Painting Draws, Trays etc - making my hobby easier

[Grendel]

So my wife and I are expecting our first child early next year, and so I need to tidy up my painting set up.

After years of painting in a room on my own, I got used to, with my ex wife, of painting in the same room, in front of the TV, and being busy I don’t see the current wife enough as it is, so do my painting in the lounge.

I used to store my paints in a box, but ended up with too many, and I have dinner trays I use for my painting tray, assembly tray, plus I have a trolley like the ones they use in foodcourts (in NZ at least) to store stuff on in the lounge as its easy to put away.

The key for me is to make things easy, so I can get home, and even if I only have half an hour, I can grab the stuff on I am working on and at least get some hobby time. But if I had to have it all hidden away, and get it out each time, I wont get as much time.

So the mission is to make things easy to get access to, but also easy to hide, and keep out of the way of a child, and also to keep the long suffering wife happy with the level of mess (she is mostly ok with it).

I will make most of this on my laser cutter, so am having to learn design at the same time so its Hobby meta, learning more hobby so I can make it easy to do hobby.

So the things I am working on are:
1.   Paint storage trays/draws
2.   Painting Tray
3.   Modelling tray
4.   Enclosed storage trolley.

I am part way through stuff for all of this, but it’s the painting draws I am the most done with, and so here are the details below.

Paint Storage Draws:

I cannot go with the usual trays people make as they usually require a full table set up so you can access them. I need something that takes up as little room as possible, and can be put away.

I decided to do the GW paints first as I have more of them than the other ranges.

MK1

So I first drafted up a draw, called the MK1, and I screwed up the measurements, and made it too big. i kept it and stored my base colours in there.



MK2 and 3
The Mk2 was the right size, though I felt that the ends were too big and the side walls much too big.
The only difference for the MK3, was I cut out a piece to make a divider for the middle (no photo as I have lost the divider).



MK4

This is the finished draw for GW paints.

I dropped the height of the side walls so its easier to get to the paints and made the divider shorter as well.

Then for the front of the draw I added the finger hold to make it easier to pull out.

Each draw can hold 16 paints, and I can get two draws to a sheet for my cutter.






Paint Draw Storage.

The next step is storing all the drawers, so I designed a holder for them all and each one carries 5 trays (as my cutter cannot go any bigger).

It takes 3 sheets to make each draw holder and I have done 2 so far.






Next steps.

As I type this, the draws for my P3 paints and larger GW paints is on the cutter and assuming I got it right then I will make the draw holder for them, and I have also designed the draw for my Army Painter and Vallego paints.

The image below shows the prototype of the dropper holder sitting in the MK2 draw.



So more to come as I get to them, any comments or questions let me know.

AL

[Grendel]

Thanks man, one of the cool things about owning a laser cutter is being able to make my own stuff. i am sure it would be cheaper and more efficient to buy it, but i like the challenge.

the dropper bottles draw will be much higher, that draw was just a test to see if the holes i made in the tray would actually fit them in, and they did, just.

even with the lower side walls its pretty sturdy as the entire lid part sits in the hole in the tray, but the higher walls will make it a bit more sturdy.

AL