I recently decided that I needed another multi-drawered cabinet to store some of my British comics. (I’m not one of those collectors who preserves their comics in sealed bags so they can never be read again, but I do want to keep them in some sort of decent condition.)
I’ve already got several of these Really Useful Box 11-Drawer Tower Things, and they are indeed really useful (hey — maybe that’s where the name comes from!)…
… but they’re a teeny-tiny tad narrower than I’d like. They’re fine for, say, DC Thomson or Marvel UK comics, but a bit of a squeeze for the old newsprint IPC titles.
Not only that, but the prices of these things have shot up in the past couple of years. The last two I bought cost me €60 each. On-line they’re about twice that now.
So I decided, what the heck: I’ve got some basic woodworking skills and an extreme allergy to spending money… I’d build my own!
After a bit of designing and measuring and such, I came up with this basic model for the cabinet’s drawers.
They have an interior dimension of 250mm by 350mm by 90mm (the Really Useful Box Tower Thingy drawers have an interior dimension of around 230mm by 360mm by 80mm).
The cabinet itself would have sixteen drawers, in two columns of eight, a bit like this:
But not exactly like that, because that imaginary pretend virtual cabinet is made out of very high quality imaginary materials, whereas mine would be made out of whatever scraps, off-cuts and discarded pieces I happened to have lying around.
To save you time reading about the build process, I kindly didn’t photograph all the hard work — you’re welcome!
Now we can skip all that and jump to the finished product:
The angle of this pic doesn’t show the cabinet’s four castor wheels, but they’re there, I promise you!
Here’s a closer look at one of the drawers:
I’m pretty pleased with the result. Including the drawers and castors, the entire cabinet is comprised of 165 pieces. Total cost: about €9.00 for the castors, and maybe a fiver for around 240-ish screws and a decent mouthful of glue. Everything else was reclaimed or discarded material. Build time: about 10 hours.
More like this…
See also: More storage solutions on my comics blog Rusty Staples
From Mars 