Hospitality-grade floor protection · Sizing help before you order · Apply for a business account
Sizing help · Apply for a business account
Hospitality-grade floor protection · Sizing help before you order · Apply for a business account
Sizing help · Apply for a business account
You pull a chair out and hear the scrape. This furniture glides guide walks through the whole job: picking the mounting and surface, measuring the leg, fitting them, and knowing which floors they belong on. Twenty minutes of reading saves a refinishing bill.
On this page:
Start here
Every one of our furniture glides is one mounting method and one surface. Answer both and the size chart is all that is left.
Question 1. What are the legs made of?
A tubular zinc rivet drives straight into the wood with a rubber mallet. No pre-drilling, no adhesive, nothing to cure. The rivet parts the wood fibers instead of cutting them, so the same hole takes a replacement years later. An anti-rotation notch keys into the grain and stops the glide spinning.
Shop nail-on glides → Step-by-step: how to fit nail-on glides.
EHBF acrylic foam tape bonds across the whole face of the leg. It covers chrome, powder-coated steel, anodized aluminum, polished plastic, and hollow tube, and it is what you want on a rental or an antique where a rivet hole is not an option.
Question 2. Should the furniture move, or stay put?
A needle-punched polyamide face that lets a chair travel quietly across a sealed floor. This is what most furniture wants, and it is the surface on the majority of the range.
A natural and chloroprene rubber face that grips instead of sliding. Fixed seating, boat and RV furniture, and anything on a polished floor that drifts when it is leaned on.
Both surfaces go on the same floors. The floor does not choose the surface, the job does.
The part people get wrong
Furniture glides have to sit flush with the leg base or just inside it. Four steps, and a printable sheet if you would rather compare against the real thing.
01
Lay the piece on its side or upside down so you can see the flat face at the very bottom of the leg. That face is what the glide attaches to, and it is what you measure.
02
Round legs: measure the diameter. Square legs: measure one side. Rectangular legs: measure both, width first. A ruler is fine; calipers are better on anything under 25 mm (0.98″).
03
Mid-century and modern legs often narrow toward the floor. Measure at the bottom, never at the top. A glide sized from the wider part of a tapered leg will overhang every time.
Between two sizes? Take the smaller one. The reason is leverage. An overhanging rim gives a rug edge or a threshold strip something to push against, and that push acts on the very edge of the glide rather than through the middle of it. Size it under the leg and the leg edge shields the glide instead of exposing it.
Before anything else
Furniture glides are built for smooth, sealed floors. On carpet or a rough hard surface they are the wrong part, and no amount of sizing fixes that.
Hardwood, engineered wood, parquet, bamboo, sealed cork. Laminate, luxury vinyl tile, vinyl plank, linoleum. Ceramic tile, terrazzo, granite, marble, smooth stone. Epoxy and polished concrete. The common thread is a sealed surface with no texture for a fiber face to snag on.
Carpet, carpet tile, area rugs. Textured tile, unpolished slate, stamped or raw concrete, brick. A grout channel deep enough to catch a fingernail counts. The hard ABS face on a slide bridges these; a PA6 fiber face dips into them and wears.
The National Wood Flooring Association’s consumer guidance lists fitting protectors to furniture legs among the practical ways to prevent scratching on a wood floor. Their full care notes are at woodfloors.org.
Five minutes for a set of four
Furniture glides fit two ways, four steps each. The step people skip is different in each one, and it is the step that decides whether the glide is still there in a year.
Nail-on, into solid wood
01
Sit the glide square on the bottom face. On square and rectangular glides, line the edges up with the leg edges rather than eyeballing the middle.
02
A rubber mallet, straight down, until the glide sits flat against the wood. No pre-drilling. A steel hammer will mark the face, so use rubber.
03
Try to turn the glide with your fingers. If it moves, the anti-rotation notch has not seated in the grain yet. One more firm tap.
The large sizes work differently. Ø 50 mm, Ø 75 mm, 50 × 50 mm and 75 × 75 mm carry EHBF acrylic foam around the rivet, so they hold mechanically and adhesively at once. Wipe the leg base with isopropyl alcohol before you drive those in, or half the fixing is doing nothing.
Self-adhesive, onto anything flat and clean
01
Isopropyl alcohol, 70% or higher, and let it flash off. This is the step that gets skipped and it is the reason most self-adhesive parts fail. Dust, oil and finish residue all sit between the tape and the leg.
02
Take the backing film off and go straight onto the leg. If the exposed adhesive touches anything else first, that face is contaminated and the bond will be weaker for it.
03
Thirty seconds of firm pressure, corner to corner, no air pockets. Then set the piece down gently and leave it 48 hours before dragging it. The weight helps the bond cure.
Nail-on furniture glides fitted to a solid wood leg
Self-adhesive furniture glides on a metal leg
What you are buying
Five parts on a nail-on glide, five on a self-adhesive one. Switch between the exploded and side views, then tap a number to read what that part is doing.
Five parts, each doing one job. The rivet anchors into solid wood without pre-drilling. The ABS body carries the load. The PA6 fiber face does the gliding. Together they stay put and stay quiet.
PA6 (Polyamide 6) needle-punched fiber at 1,450 g/m² pile density and 5.5 mm thickness. Vertically interlocked fibers resist lateral shear and delamination, even under heavy daily use on hard floors.
Automotive-grade ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) platform, the same material used in car dashboards. The PA6 fiber surface is superglue-bonded to every edge of the ABS platform, so the face and core hold together as one durable piece.
An engineered acrylic foam layer that distributes load across the full ABS platform, dampens vibration, and absorbs sound. That keeps gliding quiet and easy on the floor. It is fitted on nail-on glides in the four largest sizes only: Ø 50 mm and Ø 75 mm round, and 50 × 50 mm and 75 × 75 mm square.
Zinc-iron plated steel tubular rivet with a razor-sharp edge that separates wood fibers without pre-drilling. The precision-formed head is molded directly into the ABS platform, so the rivet and platform seat together as one piece.
A notch molded into the ABS platform that seats against the leg base. It stops the glide from spinning around the rivet, so the PA6 face wears evenly instead of in one spot.
Three parts, no rivet and no holes. The EHBF acrylic foam adhesive reaches full bond strength after 48 hours. The PA6 gliding face is the same one used on the nail-on range, so the glide feels identical underfoot.
Same PA6 (Polyamide 6) needle-punched fiber used in our nail-on furniture glides: 1,450 g/m² pile density, 5.5 mm thickness, vertically interlocked fibers. Superglue-bonded to the ABS platform so the face and core hold together as one durable piece. Glides silently across hardwood, tile, laminate, vinyl, and every other smooth, hard floor.
Same automotive-grade ABS platform as our nail-on line. High surface tension gives the superglue a secure bond to the PA6 fiber surface on every edge. The underside bonds to the EHBF adhesive backing with full contact. No air gaps, no weak points.
An engineered acrylic foam tape that bonds securely to any clean, smooth surface: chrome, powder-coated steel, anodized aluminum, finished wood, and most rigid plastics. It reaches full bond strength after 48 hours under furniture weight. No tools required.
Why the cheap ones let go
This is about mechanism, not marketing, and it is why furniture glides cost more than a bag of stick-on discs. A hardware-store pad and a molded glide are built to different assumptions, and they come apart in different ways.
The face is bonded into the body during moulding, so there is no glue line between them to give up. The fixing is either a rivet through the wood or an adhesive bonded across the whole leg base. Load travels through the body into the fixing. When it eventually wears, it wears at the face, where you can see it coming.
Horizontal felt layers pressed together with adhesive, on a thin plastic disc, held by a spot of hot-melt in the middle. Sideways load peels the layers apart and levers the disc at its edge. Humidity attacks the same glue line. It usually fails at a corner first, quietly, and the leg is on your floor before you notice.
If you would rather skip the theory
Most furniture glides jobs fall into one of these. Each links straight into the filtered range.
Pulled out and pushed in several times a day, which is the hardest duty in the house. Solid wood legs take nail-on. Smooth Glide face.
Often a metal or tube leg, and often turned rather than lifted. Self-adhesive, and size to the tube rather than the widest part of the foot.
Heavy, rarely moved, wide leg bases. The larger sizes suit these, and above Ø 50 mm you get the rivet and adhesive together.
A rectangular leg wants a rectangular glide. Measure width first, then length, and keep both inside the leg edge.
These sit still. Furniture glides will work, but a self-adhesive pad is the part built for a stationary load and it costs less per leg.
Volume, daily abuse, and a floor someone is accountable for. Nail-on where the legs are wood, and worth talking through before you order at scale.
Still open
The buying questions are answered on the glides category page. These are the ones that come up once the glides are actually on the furniture.
Furniture glides are hard, low-friction caps fitted to the bottom of furniture legs so chairs and tables move smoothly without scratching the floor. Unlike soft felt pads, engineered glides use PA6 nylon that sheds grit instead of trapping it against the finish.
Noticeably, on a hard floor. Most of the noise from a dining chair is the leg edge chattering against a sealed surface as it moves. A polyamide face turns that into a low brush. It does nothing for impact noise travelling to the room below, which is a floor build-up problem rather than a furniture one.
It depends entirely on duty. A dining chair worked twice a day wears its glides far faster than a sideboard that moves at Christmas. Check your furniture glides when a chair starts sounding or feeling rougher, and look for the face thinning to the point where the body behind it is close to the floor. Replacing at that point is a few dollars; leaving it is a refinishing job.
No. Take the old ones off first. Stacking puts the new fixing into a soft, worn layer rather than into the leg, and it raises the piece unevenly if you miss one. Nail-on glides pull out with pliers; self-adhesive ones release with gentle heat from a hairdryer.
Different part, different problem. A castor concentrates load on a small hard roller and is usually the thing damaging the floor, not the fix for it. Where a piece has to roll on a hard floor, the answer is a soft-tread castor rather than a glide fitted near one.
The heating is not the issue; the finish is. A warm floor slightly softens some finishes, so a point load sits into them more readily, which is an argument for the larger sizes rather than against glides. Follow the floor manufacturer’s guidance on surface temperature and give a new finish its full cure time before putting furniture back.
One per contact point. That is one per leg on most furniture, but a bench or sled frame touches the floor along an edge rather than at a point, and those want a strip or a sled base glide instead.
If the piece never leaves the rug, it needs nothing from this page. If it moves between rug and hard floor, fit for the hard floor, because that is the surface that scratches. A glide will drag on pile rather than glide, which is a nuisance rather than damage.
No. Cutting through the body exposes the edge, breaks the bond between face and body at the cut line, and on nail-on sizes it can leave the rivet off-center. Sizes run close enough together that there is almost always one that fits properly.
Match the shape of the leg base, not the leg above it. Round glides for round legs, square for square legs, rectangular for benches and rectangular feet. Size to the widest point of the base so the glide sits flush with the edge rather than overhanging it.
That is a sled-base chair, and it takes clip-on glides made for the tube rather than a leg-mounted glide. See sled-base glides for round and oval tubing, or the sled-base glides guide to size them.
Browse other furniture guides: Slides Guide · Pads Guide · Tube Plugs Guide · Leveling Feet Guide · Sled Base Guide · Tile Floors Guide · Nail-On Glides How-To
Product categories: Furniture Glides · Furniture Slides · Furniture Pads · Tube Plugs & End Caps · Leveling Feet · Sled Base Glides
Business accounts: Business pricing for volume pricing, B2B accounts, and commercial orders.
That is the guide
If you have read this furniture glides guide and still are not sure, a photo of the bottom of the leg with a ruler across it is quicker than another paragraph. We will name the size and the mounting.
