Wednesday, June 8, 2011

DVD-CD Storage Cabinet

When my mother-in-law asked me to design a DVD-CD storage cabinet, these plans are what I had originally come up with. It turns out she really only needed to store DVD?s, so the plans were scrapped and gave way to the DVD storage cabinet you?ll see elsewhere on the site.
I was bummed that she only wanted a simple shelf, because I had come up with a kinda clever way of locating the adjustable shelves to fit various combinations of CD?s and DVD?s. Although I never had a chance to actually build the original shelf, I'm publishing it here for those who might find it useful.
Material There isn?t much to say about materials. It?s designed with the same white melamine as the DVD cabinet, with white PVC edge banding. As with many of the projects you'll find here, it could also be built out of plywood or even solid lumber.
I did learn something new about edge banding while designing the DVD-CD storage cabinet and building the DVD shelf. Most of my experience with banding has been operating automatic glue pot edgebanders in a commercial shop. During my very first job in a cabinet shop I also had some exposure to a simple table-top hot air bander, but that?s about it.
Recently I bought a used Virutex hand-held hot air edgebander (apparently the same machine is marketed under the Grizzly brand name). I?m accustomed to high quality PVC edge banding and was quite disappointed to discover that virtually all of the pre-glued edge banding on the market is cheap, lightweight vinyl. No wonder hot air edge banding has such a poor reputation!
I contacted my favorite edge banding supplier, Frama-Tech, and they are able to pre-glue any of their stock PVC colors for a small fee. That?s pretty awesome considering they?re incredible at matching even the most obscure laminate color. Of course my first order of PVC was white for the DVD-CD storage cabinet but it could have been just about any color I wanted.
I?m used to 15/16? edge banding and it worked very well in the Virutex bander. Having a bit of extra width was helpful in making sure it completely covered the edge of the board when my hand wasn?t running very steady. I used a FastCap Quad Pro Trimmer on the edges and a Flush Cut Trimmer for the ends. It went very quickly and you can?t tell the difference between the hand-held bander?s work and that from a $25,000 automatic glue pot bander!
Hardware Other than some small size differences, the major difference between the original DVD-CD storage cabinet and the plain old DVD shelf is in the shelf pin hole location and hardware. Initially, I wanted the CD storage shelf to be configurable for several combinations of CD?s or DVD?s. Regular 32mm system holes don?t always line up nicely for storing items of a real specific size. So I placed holes in a modestly sized cabinet such that the resulting shelf spacing would be a ?perfect? fit for storing CD?s, DVD?s, or VHS cassettes.
In the original design I had figured on using a low profile, concealed shelf support. The main purpose for this was to allow the shelf to be centered on the pin holes rather than sitting above the holes on shelf pins. I also liked the clean look of no exposed shelf supports. This requires slot to be cut in the ends of the shelves to conceal the shelf support.
When I switched to the simple DVD shelf, I also simplified the construction by eliminating the concealed support in favor of an angled steel shelf support. The angled support didn?t require the extra groove in the ends of the shelves, but still centered the shelf on the pin holes. I left the concealed support in the original DVD-CD storage cabinet plans just so you could see a nice alternative method for supporting adjustable shelves.
Drawing File Even though the DVD shelf design turned out nice, I still like this design better. Hopefully you?ll enjoy it too. You can view the drawings by clicking on the link below. If you'd like to download a copy to your computer, right click then "save-as". Either way, you'll need the Adobe reader to view the file.
View or Download "DVD-CD Storage Cabinet Plans"
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