siggy_7
Full time tool collector, part time woodworker
I've been tasked with building and fitting a new kitchen. I'm planning to build the units from scratch with melamine faced ply (my experiences with MFC have been less than positive). Our kitchen is a bit of a funny shape - it's a combined kitchen-diner and the room is an L-shape; you enter the kitchen area from one end with a run of cabinets down each side and along the far end also. This creates two blind corners at the far end; because of a chimney on one corner the depth of the right hand blind corner is a great deal shallower than the left.
The challenge is to build in organisers into the cabinets to make the most efficient use of the space. Having looked at most of the solutions available, they generally have two downsides: inefficient use of space and lack of weight capacity.
The most efficient usage of space would be to use a system of boxes that you pull out like this: http://woodgears.ca/kitchen/organizer.html. However, if you want to get to the back of the deep cupboard (the blind space will be about 800mm deep) that's a lot of shuffling around of stuff which seems a right PITA. I'd much rather have some mechanism to do the shuffling for me - partly because of effort and partly because I think it's snazzier!
The best solution I have seen so far is something like this: http://www.thehardwarehut.com/catalog-product.php?p_ref=258332 The caddy, which is nice and square to maximise useful space, slides out and then hinges out of the way, leaving space to access the shelving from behind which runs forward on normal drawer slides. It looks like the pull out caddy might just be running on normal drawer slides, which I don't think will take the loading of a 450mm wide loaded caddy very well as it's cantilevered and projecting quite a distance forward of the slides (despite claims to the contrary I know that it's going to be full of tins of food and cast iron cookware at some point). So I'm thinking of building a caddy like the above, but using a pair of round shafts and ball race linear bearings to carry the weight. My scoping calcs suggest this is quite doable with a sensible sized rail (16-20mm diameter).
Before I embark on a design and build exercise, has anyone seen better solutions to this problem?
The challenge is to build in organisers into the cabinets to make the most efficient use of the space. Having looked at most of the solutions available, they generally have two downsides: inefficient use of space and lack of weight capacity.
The most efficient usage of space would be to use a system of boxes that you pull out like this: http://woodgears.ca/kitchen/organizer.html. However, if you want to get to the back of the deep cupboard (the blind space will be about 800mm deep) that's a lot of shuffling around of stuff which seems a right PITA. I'd much rather have some mechanism to do the shuffling for me - partly because of effort and partly because I think it's snazzier!
The best solution I have seen so far is something like this: http://www.thehardwarehut.com/catalog-product.php?p_ref=258332 The caddy, which is nice and square to maximise useful space, slides out and then hinges out of the way, leaving space to access the shelving from behind which runs forward on normal drawer slides. It looks like the pull out caddy might just be running on normal drawer slides, which I don't think will take the loading of a 450mm wide loaded caddy very well as it's cantilevered and projecting quite a distance forward of the slides (despite claims to the contrary I know that it's going to be full of tins of food and cast iron cookware at some point). So I'm thinking of building a caddy like the above, but using a pair of round shafts and ball race linear bearings to carry the weight. My scoping calcs suggest this is quite doable with a sensible sized rail (16-20mm diameter).
Before I embark on a design and build exercise, has anyone seen better solutions to this problem?
