Hasses Magiska Blog: A Spice rack

The Result!

Why?

So don't know about you folks but the state of our dried herbs and spices used to bee a total mess. Some of them where residing: on the hood, others beside the stove and another bunch in a cabinet. This resulted in spices.being bought twice and sometimes even quadruple times while others ended up not being available when needed. One day my girlfriend yelled out in pain: "this mess will never end". So I decided It was time for some action.

Requirements

I Set up the following requirements:

Easy access in plain sight.
Each spice should have Its own dedicated place (I believe this Is a necessary to prevent everything from ending up in disarray, but more disciplined persons may not need this).
Make use of space otherwise unused (since our kitchen is quite small).
Easy to clean.
Have room for at least 40 standard sized jars.
Include kitchen roll dispenser (this where not a requirement until I came up with a solution that required that I moved the dispenser in place)
Include a Kitchen computer and speakers (This wasn't as much a requirement as me having an unused tablet that I wanted to make use of).

Solution

One day having dinners at the neighbors I noticed that the lamp fixing and the skirt to hide it built something like 6cm under their kitchen cabinet, but with a lot of unused space around the fixtures.

I thought this was a perfect place to hide our spice jars and a chance to add some extra outlets and some lamps. Since I had a small unused tablet laying around I thought It would be nice to fit that as well.

So I fiddled around with the design for quite some time and came up with some quite elaborated plans, some involving camshafts, levers cogwheels and what not to push the jars out of their dedicated dens, before ending up with the current design.

The verdict

So I have had this spice rack up for something like 2 months and I must say It Is everything I wanted it to be (even tho I ended up scrapping the idea with the kitchen computer). After just a few days I feel that I learned where to find each spice and It's a real time saver.

Room for improvement

Despite the above self-appraisal, I would do some stuff differently If I were to do It again.

This was the first time I made excessive use of the laser cutter at my local maker space In any project. In ore over the possibilities with my new "hammer", I just kept hammering away not really considering if a hammer really was the best solution to every aspect of this build. In retrospect, I believe I somewhat overused it.

After throwing the kitchen-computer Idea overboard the design with the angle is overcomplicated and the modularization into four pizes unnecessary. Today I would probably keep the design of the spice compartments but mount em on one 12mm plywood board with the same size as the underside of my cabinet, this would build another 8mm compared to the current design but would make everything much easier when it comes to mounting straight etc. And for the ease of things, I would just mount a couple IKEA "Utrusta" lamps behind the spice compartments (fitting spacers under so they are in level with the height of the spice compartments) and just use "regular wood" cut to size to fill any residing gaps.

This way of building it Is also more accessible to anyone that doesn't have access to a laser cutter and instead have to rely upon a laser cutting service.

Other considerations could be to redesign the compartments as well so that they store 2-5 spices (of course keeping the Idea of dedicated placeholders). The advantage of that would be to reduce the number of slots and handles making It a bit easier to keep clean and probably much easier to mount totally straight.

That said the current design Is still a lot tidier than keeping them on a rack directly over the stove and based on the use so far I say the slots are tight enough for easy enough cleaning. It is also very satisfying to just flip down exactly the spice your after.

Finally, after paying for forty times four small neodymium magnets costing a small fortune. I did consider other solutions to keep the compartments up. However, the feeling of the magnets sort of smoothly snap things into place makes it totally worth it.

Tips

Be very rigorous when gluing the compartments, make sure they are straight and do not overuse glue. Make a few extra compartments, in case of some turn out less than perfect. Be very picky about the plywood especially the thickness. The design is for 4mm, not 3,7 or 4.4. Make sure to glue the magnets in place before putting the boxes together (oh how I wished someone had told me this). Other than that you should be fine.

The Build

As mentioned almost everything is laser-cut

Is sorta like A gigant gigsaw puzze dependent on how one counts it's well over 800 parts

I made a list of all spices I usually use and ended up with 40 spices (Frech herbs, liquids, paste's and roots where naturally not included) Gluing forty compartments was BORING.

Then there was a lot of sanding thank good for the belts sander at Sthlm Maker Space

Even thou there where some specifications of the magnets I still was i bit worried if they would hold the weight of the spice, here is some initial test

Initially there where plans for a small computer and some speakers. My first try ended up having a small but anoying wining noice. Second trial was even more over enginered and ended up as scrap. Making me eventurly abandon that plan.