Record Crate

My whole life, I have always been intrigued by how vinyl records worked. I found it astonishing how a piece of plastic could store audio information and replay it for many years after. That being said, I began collecting records and got my own record player. After some time, I had amassed a decently sized collection and needed a better way to store them than the average plastic milk crate. I decided to build my own crate. I wanted it to be a square shape and have the records lay flat along the sides without any angle. And so, I got to work on SolidWorks.

After some time, I ended up with this concept. As I have said before, 1x4 pieces of wood were not all that expensive at the time, so that is the wood that I decided to use for the design. It was time to begin creating the physical version.

Here are some images from when I began the basic cuts for each piece. Since all of the components of the crate were rectangular, I figured a circular saw would be the easiest tool to use to make all of the cuts.

Once all of the pieces were cut to size, I began fastening them together by initially drilling pilot holes and then screwing them together. I used clamps to make sure that I was getting the tightest fit possible for each piece.

Here is the final product of fastening all of the pieces together. I looked at it and decided that it needed something a little extra to make it perfect for storing my records safely. I decided to add some car trunk liner to the bottom to add some cushion between the album and crate. You may notice that the sides at which the pillars are screwed onto are not the same as in the CAD model from above. I decided to change it while building it because I figured that the albums would sit in the crate much better in this arrangement compared to the original.

In the left image, I cut each strip to size to be placed along each plank on the bottom of the crate. Then, I used a spray adhesive to stick the carpet to the wood.

Here is the final product without any albums in it. The strips of carpet provide a nice layer of cushion for the albums.

Here is the crate with some of my albums loaded into it. The records are able to lay flat onto each other and I am able to fit a decent amount. I was surprised by how heavy the crate got when it was fully loaded, but the construction was sturdy enough to handle it.

To test my SolidWorks abilities, I decided to recreate the crate exactly in SolidWorks in case I planned on making another one.

For the final model, I included textures, pilot holes, fasteners, and carpet. I also included a bill of materials, which is very helpful because it shows the amount of each part used. I also used the rendering tool to create life-like images of the model which look quite realistic.