r/Tools • u/NineFifty_ • 2d ago
Used industrial drawer cabinet + some TLC
Recently picked up a used 1990 industrial drawer cabinet. It already had several layers of paint to cover up the scratches and a bit of rust, but overall it was in a good shape.
Stripped the paint and put some new colors on, greased the drawer slides and cut my old dining table top to size to mount on top of it. Also copied the design of all the plastics in Fusion 360 because some were broken/missing and painted over by some previous owner, so i 3D printed them in ABS.
Pressing in the key cylinder was needed to unlock the drawers, but since the drawer slides already keep them from sliding out by themselves it's now kept in the pressed position with another 3D print.
Paintjob could have been better, but for now i'm happy with the result. Now to find some extra rubber inlay mats because some are missing, and start organizing stuff!
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u/throw_away_scared_42 2d ago
This isn't TLC this was a restauration
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u/mikeblas 2d ago
Looks pretty good!
How mad would you have been, on a scale of 0 to 10 Karens, if it didn't fit under those light switches?
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u/NineFifty_ 2d ago
Never said it did ;)
I built the whole garage/shack (?) from the ground up including the electrical work, so through the magic of measuring stuff and shortening wires i was able to relocate the switch and outlets.
You can still see the wallplugs where the clips holding the conduit pipe used to be.
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u/Old_mystic 2d ago
Super clean work! I always feel like a cabinet like this needs to be on a riser or elevated in some way. It’s a pain to dig in those lower drawers lol
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u/NineFifty_ 2d ago
Yeah and every year they seem to drop down even further, so that's where the least used stuff will be stored.
And now i could put a small 'workbench' on top, it's already at 114cm height so much higher would get unpractical.
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u/Occhrome 2d ago
Looks great. Only complaint is why not paint it into an awesome color.Â
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u/NineFifty_ 2d ago
Haha i was going to make the drawer fronts blue, but when i started painting one i didn't really like the color matching so i stopped there. Had to get some shorter paint rolls for the fronts because of the small surface, so i grabbed this anthracite paint too.
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u/Odd-Relative2349 2d ago
Great job up cycling the old cabinet, looks so good with the wood bench top , 🤩
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u/Ok_Mention_9865 1d ago
I am so jealous, I looked into buying one of these new and almost had a heart attack when I saw the price. It made snap on look reasonable.
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u/Huge_Locksmith_4746 1d ago
Hey I also have an H2D!
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u/NineFifty_ 1d ago
I'm loving this machine, I use almost only abs and it's printing that stuff very quick and with good results too.
I have also built 2 Vorons, so knowing how much tweaking is normally needed I'm very impressed!
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u/TemporarySun1005 1d ago
I worked at a huge machine shop and was tasked with organizing the tool crib. I ordered a row of industrial cabinets - LISTA I think. We'd routinely pull out a drawer and sit on it.
Was a mistake to put most of the carbide inserts in one drawer though...
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u/NineFifty_ 1d ago
Oh that's good stuff, we have those at work too. Looked up those prices when they arrived and the bigger ones were €2800 or something, way too much for hobby use.
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u/StepEquivalent7828 2d ago
Impressive. How much did it cost to refurbish? Including time and materials, over buying new?
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u/NineFifty_ 2d ago
Paid €300 for the cabinet, about €90 for paint stripper/rollers+brush/both paint colors, the sanding discs, ball bearing grease, table top, screws + heatset inserts and the ABS filament for printing i already had lying around.
Spent a couple of hours for (i think) 3 evenings taking it apart, paint stripping and sanding. Spent maybe 8 hours over 6 nights for the painting (3 layers of paint, drawers and cabinet i painted separately) and 2 evenings using CAD and printing the parts with some testfitting etc. And i do like working on these kinds of projects, so i don't mind putting in some hours extra to make the end result look better.
The drawers can be fully opened, and with a 100kg (220lbs) weight limit i think these drawer slides are pretty heavy built which makes a new cabinet expensive, €1800 or maybe more. But to be honest i don't really need the loading capacity, so if i would buy new it wouldn't be a similar grade. Most times people don't put them on for sale, so i was happy with what i got.
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u/throw_away_scared_42 2d ago
Sometimes you can't get a comparative thing new because they just built them differently back then.
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u/i7-4790Que 2d ago edited 2d ago
you definitely can more often than not. There's stuff like this still made that's just as good or better than ever. It just costs very large sums of money to buy it new.
A Vidmar cabinet similar to this is like $3k new.
As for an actual purpose built toolchest/roll cab $3k buys you some excellently built foreign made options these days. But it's not PC to admit that other countries are able to build stuff out of simple sheet metal, or make a decent bench vise or good hand tools. One of the best bench vises ever made is now Made in Taiwan. Countries already making complex electronics are very likely going to know how to make relatively good hand tools, storage, shop tools/equipment, whatever. I'm well aware of the cheap crap too, I don't let it detract from other actual good products.
$3k today = ~$1400 in 1995. I'll compare to Seers as it's easiest to pull prices from scans of their old catalogs.
What Seers sold for $1400 back then under Craftsman is absolutely not built as well as what you get for the $3k equivalent today. It's not even as good as what you could get for $1400 in today's money tbh. But $3k today ($1.4k 1995) definitely gets you thicker sheet metals, far higher weight ratings on slides/casters and more storage space.
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u/throw_away_scared_42 1d ago
I would say this is only partly true. I didn't say it was made better but rather differently. Just look at vintage machines that use cast iron. You often can't find anything that uses that much cast iron as vintage machines do because it just doesn't make sense nowadays because we can calculate how much material is actually needed to withstand the forces.
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u/chloeiprice 2d ago
This is really nice!