New paint rack

Ever since citadel came out with its layer paint range I've been looking for a good way to store those paints.  I have the full set, minus a few of the recent additions, so I need a way to easily find and put away paints as I use them.  For a long time I used a parts drawer thing from Lowes, with each drawer holding about 6 paints (base, layer, layer x2).  This was ok, but not ideal.  A few years back I had made a nice rack for my reaper paints, but that style wasn't going to work for citadel paints.  Any purchased solutions were going to be too expensive or take up too much space for all of the paints.  I finally came up with a solution that I though would work and got to it.

Here's a pic of the final rack.  I put hinges and latches, so you can close it and its semi-portable.  Its a bit tall to take anywhere, and I'm not sure the paints would stay in place if it was on its side... maybe mark II will be improved to fix that.

 more after the break...

The idea I came up with involved using a router to make cutouts that would keep the bottles in place.  To do this I made a guides to go on the wood any my router in sketchup:

Using a 3/4 bit the router would carve out grooves that each bottle would roughly fit into.  The bottles aren't held securely, but it was going to do the trick.  I used some 1x3 wood I had left over in my basement and gave it a try.  Once I found that this worked I knew the rest would be good.  Each shelf would have room for 15 bottles as I like to organize them as base, layer, layer.

I decided that I wanted extra shelves to hold other items and also to make the bottom two taller to hold things like the double size washes and dropper bottles.  Once those were all cut I made a frame out of the some pine shelving and cut slots for each shelf.  I nailed that all together and added an MDF backing.

Time to see if it all goes together... I made an error spacing the shelves and they are and extra inch taller than I intended... but that's ok and doesn't really impact anything other than the overall size.  Then I bought some hinges and latches so the whole thing could be closed and transported.

If I were to do it all over again I can think of some other improvements I would make.  First, I think I would make it half the height and do for sections.  This would make it easier to transport and if done correctly could still be stacked on your table to give the same effective height.  Second I would reduce the height between shelves.  It doesn't quite need to be this high and I hadn't intended it to be that way.  Finally I would find a better way to close the back.  I made the side pieces a little longer and cut a goove for the back piece, but its still a little ugly.  I'm not sure what the best way to do this would be, but I would have liked it to be better.

This may become obsolete as I'm taking a laser cutter course at my local library next month, and maybe I'll come up with a better design using those tools.