Another episode of building stuff for Fab Lab Bcn, this time with an original design.
The brief was simple: “we need storage for the sheets of material we use for the laser cutter. We have cardboard, plywood, acrylic, metal. We also want to lock the material up. Also, some place to store tools would be good as well, and also scrap material.” (not the official conversation)
One of the requirements for this piece of furniture was to be mobile, in case we need to move it place. As it would carry heavy material and could easily weigh in the 100s of KGs, I decided to use a wooden palette as the base.
The sheets of material are 1000x600mm, so the drawers have to be at least that. I thought for the sake of tidiness, it’d be nice to integrate the furniture into the laser cutting room. The vacuum press is 1410mm deep and 940mm high, so I thought if I used those dimensions for the width and height of this piece of furniture, it’d look like an extension of it.
I had already design and built a few things for the Fab Lab (namely the tables for the office, the bookshelves and the CNCeption) and had started to have a design theme across them: plywood, red and black.
The handles for the drawers are made out of strap belts, red to keep with the design. You pull them and the drawers come out, but if you pull them up after, it lifts the material to make it easier to grab it, if it’s the last sheet.
I decided to use telescopic drawers so that the extraction and deposit of material is easier, than sliding it in and out. I needed to find telescopic sliders that were around 600mm in length, could extend completely out, and support roughly 50kg (I calculated a 5mm sheet of acrylic was about 2kg, so you could stack 25 of them in one drawer – the cardboard and plywood sheets are so light that you don’t need to worry about them).
