"Stroke" is the distance over which the damper actually acts — from engagement to the end of its travel. It is not the depth of the drawer, and not the length of the slide.
On a drawing it is a specific number in millimetres, but what decides it is not "how deep is the drawer" — it is how the drawer behaves in its last stretch.
There is one criterion
The damper has to engage before the drawer starts to slow down.
Once pushed, a drawer accelerates, coasts, and then decelerates to a stop. For the damper to do its job it has to provide resistance through that whole deceleration phase. If it arrives too late, the first part of that phase is unmanaged — and what you feel and hear is "a knock, then a soft finish".
If the stroke is too short
- No resistance in the early part, so the drawer has already built up speed before it is caught → a heavier sound and a noticeable impact.
- It looks like "the damper is weak", but the force may be perfectly correct — it simply engaged too late.
Increasing the force here is the wrong fix. It may reduce the impact, but the drawer becomes harder to push and may stop short of fully closed.
If the stroke is too long
- It takes up space, the mechanism has to be longer, and the cabinet needs more depth.
- The drawer may not close fully — it hits its end stop before the damper finishes.
- Cost goes up and the feel does not get better.
How to measure it
Do not just measure drawer depth. Measure:
- The distance from the engagement point — where the damper starts being carried — to fully closed.
- Whether the drawer is still moving at constant speed through that distance, or already decelerating.
- Whether the slide itself has damping or self-closing in that range (if it does, subtract it).
With those three, the stroke can be set. Given only a drawer depth, we can estimate — but it is an estimate.
Stroke and force are separate things
This gets mixed up often. On our mechanisms:
- Pull-out force (typically 15–25 N) decides how hard it is to pull open.
- Return time (typically 0.8–1.2 s) decides how slowly it closes.
- Stroke decides where the control starts.
All three are adjustable independently. So a drawer that slams is not automatically a force problem — check the stroke first, then the force.