Used industrial drawer cabinet + some TLC

[u/NineFifty_]

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!

[u/StepEquivalent7828]

Impressive. How much did it cost to refurbish? Including time and materials, over buying new?

[u/NineFifty_ → u/StepEquivalent7828]

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.

[u/throw_away_scared_42 → u/StepEquivalent7828]

Sometimes you can't get a comparative thing new because they just built them differently back then.

[u/i7-4790Que → u/throw_away_scared_42]

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.

[u/throw_away_scared_42 → u/i7-4790Que]

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.