Paint rack for my all my paint bottles.

I could not find any to my demands.

It could be that I’m bad at searching the internet or that I believe everything I find is too expensive… But also that I’m to demanding…

I could however not find a paint rack for all my bottles that was good enough my demands. They where all either to expensive (shipping is NOT something cheap when parcels starts to get big)… To big… or to heavy… To ugly or just badly constructed. And their for I decided to use my previous learned CAD knowledge into something useful and to my preferences.

What did I wanted?

I wanted something sturdy and compact where I could fit a lot of bottles. I wanted the price to be affordable in case I wanted to sell some of them to friends. Making a business out of it was never my idea from the start.

The design process

I introduced the idea to a few of my friends and realized early that everyone had their own ideas of what’s a good rack. Some wanted the bottles bottom down and some the opposite. A few wanted it to be on the wall and others standing on the desk with various angles.

It is impossible to make everyone happy and I decided to go for what I wanted. After I gave it lot of thoughts these were to important points I wanted to make happen:

  • Compact, sturdy / durable
  • Transportable
  • Hold between 70-100 bottles
  • Could be placed on the wall or on the desk.
  • As cheep as possible without loosing the points above

 

Construction

Before actually making something concrete I tried a lot of different sizes of the holes for the bottles. There are a lot of brands out there (Vallejo, P3 and Scale75 just to mention a few) with almost the same dimensions. I personally mostly use Scale and a few Vallejo and use these as measure. The GW pots are all to wide and would not be a good match if I wanted the rack to be compact enough.

The next thing I needed was to find a good distance between the holes. Compact and sturdy was the leading words here. To little would make the rack brittle and to wide would make the rack bigger. When this was selected I looked at my bags where I would transport the rack. This gave me the length and width and at the same time decided the nr of bottles… where it landed on 97 pcs. To get the bottles a little bit more fixed for transportation I went for an extra layer inside the box with the same dimensions as the top.

After everything was finalized I had a prototype laser cut in 3mm MDF. This really gave me the feel of what I done right as well as wrong. Luckily it was not that many changes needed.

The final touch would be to add and good stand. The idea here was something that could let the rack stand of its own accord with a big angle as well as a smaller one.

Production

When the final changes was done all that was left was to send the drawing to a company who could produce my racks. For me it was difficult to decide how many pcs of it I should do. The bigger order the cheaper ones and vice versa. Finally I went for 20 and let the internet know I had a few once’s to sell for a rather cheap cost. The biggest problem was my friends abroad who wanted one. Shipping it abroad the cost was almost as high as the final price I decided on and of that reason all of the racks went to Swedish buyers.

Don’t get me wrong here. I had decided to make them cheap but I also

had spend both time and money on the project. There for I added something on the final price just so I could make more and did not have to spend more of my savings to do this.

The Future

All of the 20 pcs are sold and everyone seems to be happy with the result. The project was fun to start with but I also at the same time learned a lot with production, contacts, cost and stuff like that. Also people has come to me with ideas and changes they would like to see. Some are definitely good ones and some are a to much change to my initial idea.

I will probably however make another batch of them and also make one or two other versions of it in order to give in into the demands…. 😉

Would you be interested in getting one or two paint racks? Let me know and hopefully I’ve produced another batch. If not all ideas are also welcome.

2 Comments

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  1. Please contact me by email
    What was the cost of the paintrack
    I mayby have something to offer

    1. Hello Henry. I have emailed you a response. Happy new year.

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