Workshop Projects

Eurotainer Cabinet

I have had for a number of years quite a lot of ‘Eurotainers’- sturdy industrial plastic boxes, bought cheaply secondhand or found at the local recycling centre. They prove really useful for storage, and as they are a modest size, cope well when filled with heavy metal items. They do, however have the disadvantage of not fitting efficiently on the Dexion shelves I have and so they often end up stacked up, making it difficult to get to items.  I therefore decided to make a custom rack to fit them in.

The build is a simple construction, mostly made of 18mm marine ply bought cheaply from Oxford Wood Recycling. The size was dictated largely by the wood available, whilst trying to keep it manageable.

Oxford Wood Recycling  Routed Wood
Raw timber & Rebates routed along edges

Routed dados
Stopped dados routed with the aid of a simple jig

Guillotine  Gabro
Steel sheet blanks cut on guillotine & foled on Gabro folder

Bracket
Finished brackets

Dividers and sides are let into dados & rebates, cut with a router. Some 6mm ply is let into a rebate on the rear, and everything glued and screwed (or nailed) up.

Edges are capped off with some strips cut from scrap Meranti timber and glued and nailed to the front. The whole lot being finished with some polyurethane varnish.

The unit sits on a small ply made with off cuts of ply and a length of CLS, this time from Northampton Wood Recycling. This is painted in a matt black.

Four adjustable feet were fitted into T-Nuts on the plinth to allow levelling. The feet were adjusters recovered from a broken baby gate.

15 Eurotainers fit into vertical bays, each provided with metal brackets that run along the stepped section on the base of the containers. The brackets were cut from 1mm thick mild steel sheet, cut out on the metal guillotine, holes punched in for screws with a Whitney type punch and then folded using the Gabro folder. Screw holes are offset so screws clear each other when screwed from both sides of the ply.

The Rack has been put in place in the workshop and already filled. I have a few smaller containers, so will probably now make another, smaller rack that sits on top to take these. Putting this in place also means a bit of a re-jig in the workshop.

Eurocabinet  Eurocabinet
The finished unit

Material Rack

This rack was made of an outer frame of 12mm ply, glued and nailed together and a series of lengths of 68mm drainpipe. Most of the pipe had been used in a previous rack I had owned for years and had been disposed of by a friends company,, but that was a bit 'floppy' so I took the chance to re-build it for the new workshop. The additional ipe was off cuts from doing jobs on the house. As well as a more substantial frame in two parts, the pipe was bonded together with solvent weld adhesive as it was assembled.

Material Rack

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(c) M. Pantrey 2020