record storage

possibly hopeless query: a few years ago a friend hooked me up with six stackable LP storage boxes from her mom's garage. one assumes they are from the 70s or maybe early 80s. they are white, some form of wood product, 13.5" by 13.5" by 13.5". each is divided into six compartments by five thin vertical dividers, which are set back a half-inch from the front. this reduces the capacity of each cube, but keeps the records nice and vertical imo. at the center of the top of each one is a little peg sticking out, and at the center of the bottom of each one is a little hole. very very easy to slide into place and stack up when moving. there are no identifying manufacturers' marks or product names; do any of y'all verterans out there recognize this ungoogleable product?? i would buy more of these if they could be found by name.

seen at the left sides of these two images:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4391/36199484254_5e683a9e6f_c.jpg

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4376/37034662125_604de38fc4_c.jpg

i really like how little wasted space they generate, aside from the width lost to the dividers - there's no real estate thrown away to chunky back or front zones i don't need, as you can see happening with the IKEA shelves below the white boxes. those inches count for a lot in a brooklyn bedroom. also i think the dividers help my screwy record psychology, creating mental "sections" and also helping me to "see" parts of the collection that my eyes might otherwise pass over. anyway my collection is at the point where i have to add shelving, punt a bunch of stuff, or stop buying records, and clearly the answer is shelving.

i don't have any useful info but i am interested in your thoughts on the Spin Clean

nice cat picture doc!

those are really nice dr c.

i got a friend of mine to custom build me a media cabinet/record cabinet and matching wall cabinet out of birch ply and i have probably never been happier with a piece of furniture in my life. i think i paid £1600 all in. i'll dig out pix tonight. it's got drawers for cables, a niche that exactly fits my speaker, etc.

aw thanks! re: the spinclean: i thought i'd posted about it to a vinyl cleaning thread but actually it was in Shady scams and other silly business ideas to take advantage of earnest new vinyl collectors where i got sold on the thing.

anyway... love it, hooked, ended up obsessively cleaning every record i own with it. it's definitely a task and a pain and you have to set aside time for it but that can be good listening time, to get into the groove. often times it makes no real difference to the sound but when it does it's like windexing a grimy window, suddenly this crappy old record sounds amazing. definitely buy the one that comes with extra drying cloths cause you'll need them and buying the dinky-sized extra-cloth packs separately was a bummer.

also be aware that once you're hooked it will sort of screw up your buying/listening habits - i don't want to put anything dirty on the table so now i end up saving up little batches of new acquisitions to wash before i listen to anything! kinda silly, might just be my problem.

You can get a big pack of no lint microfiber cloths from Amazon, or an auto supply place for cheap. Folks use them for drying cars.

If you reuse, don't wash them with other clothes because they'll pick up lint from the laundry and will deposit the funk on yr records.

Thanks!

I'm using IKEA Bosnäs ottomans for storage. They're ventilated, dust-free, washable, stackable, easy to carry, and you can sit on them.

in Denmark we call those types of shelves "bogkasser" - it means book boxes, and it's a great google image search term

here's an example of a newly manufactured version of the bogkasse known as Kubik https://www.traevarer.dk/kubik-trae-hel-reolkasse-6-rum

dunno if you'll find an American retailer though...

I have about 10 of those at home, they're tops for record storage, and books too!

oh yeah btw "bogkasse" is the singular term, may be an even better google search term

not being able to solve this is maddening. just some simple, well-built and sturdy stackable cubes, 13.5" on every side. you'd think the market would be flooded with such things but everybody wants to sell you some funky designer thing that holds 25 LPs total, or some cheap bullshit that will obviously fall apart, or more IKEA stuff that's way oversized for the job at hand. am i gonna need to design this shit myself and walk to the lumberyard and figure out how to glue pieces of wood together with square joints and shit?

these are really appealing esp. since you can get optional feet (which'd be cool for the bottom tier). but yikes at $99 per cube plus bulky shipping. i dig supporting hand craft at reasonable rates but not sure my storage problem is worth $600+ at the moment. wish you could minus the doors which i would never use.

this is the perfect record shelf imo, 700 DKK is ~120 USD:
https://www.traevarer.dk/kubik-trae-hel-reolkasse-6-rum

you can write them via this formula to ask about shipping costs:
https://www.traevarer.dk/kontakt

but maybe you can also just ask you local carpenter to build one, it's not a complex construction (or maybe go on a FB DIY page and ask for any takers to build it and what's a fair price)

hmmm, the getting-someone-to-build-some angle is appealing tbh. i'd be willing to shell out extra cash for getting 'em juuuust right without having to get all frustrated fucking around with wood and stuff and end up doing a crappy job myself.

you don't really want a cube because they're too heavy to lift. You can get stackable boxes either in a really tough cardboard or plastic from Bags Unlimited. They have two gauges of cardboard and I've tried both. The lighter cardboard can be taped up with packing tape when the boxes get old - I haven't had to throw out a box yet and I reinforced some boxes with paint stirrers on the long sides. The heavier cardboard, unfortunately, still uses the lighter cardboard lids.

I've seen the plastic boxes, too, and they're very tough.

Anyway, buy 25 at a time and they're pretty affordable. They hold about 60 records each. You can stack them 5 high, but the company recommends stacking them 3 high (I usually do 4). I write roughly what I've put in the boxes on the outside.

I want a cube. I have a cube. I have 9 of these 70x70cm shelves. They are awesome. You can stack them. You can hang fill them with records and hang them on your wall. They are an all time success in Danish design. They are made from wood.

You can move the inner shelves around too, use them for cds, books, whatever, put in drawers. Great stuff.

Actually I bought 16 of them, got a great deal, less than 200 euros, used lot, but gave away/sold some cause I didn't have room for them. Anyway, I'll stop now.

i do want a cube; i like the cubes i have that i was recently posting about. they're super liftable and when i move house i don't need to transfer the records into something else to do it. but i guess potentially the heavier-duty ones with the thick birch plywood wouldn't be so good. tbh at this stage i'm not really interested in anything that needs taping up or paint stirrers. definitely no cardboard or plastic - but i'm glad that system works for you, it's good to know it's out there!

if you win the lottery Danish brand Montana has a 6 times more expensive version of the shelves I linked to above:
https://www.danishdesignstore.com/collections/shop-by-manufacturer-montana-mobler/products/lassen-show-wall-shelving-module-montana-mobler

i don't have a lot of records with me here but i will need to transport ~30 records to another country...is bringing them as a carry on on an airplane okay?

should be, I've probably carried that many in a bag on a plane before.

cool
thank you

Doc, some cubes here: Olympia Record Crates. Seem a little spendy to me, but look nice.

Aw, those do look nice! Spendy indeed, but pleasantly minimal. Hmmmmm.

My friend's husband recently plunked down for a bunch of MapleShade stuff, which seems classily-designed - like, there are modules for other formats that don't look awkward as hell with the LPs. The basic 150-LP module in finished oak is $100 ($85 if you buy four or more) but that's without bottom and top flat pieces. Man...looks good though.

Unfinished oak at $80 each with bottoms, plus $40 for a little base at the floor. Man... now that's tempting.

https://images.homedepot-static.com/productImages/efd857b4-f3a7-4bdd-b604-c861f0348b6d/svn/natural-way-basics-media-storage-wb-2lp-nl-44_1000.jpg

these things are made of "zboard" which seems like paper?
but i love the staging: rusty stereo, landline phone, film camera, and a boat. i think one of those books is upside down, too.

by 'love' do you mean 'hate'?

multiple copies of the same lps too.

i want to hate it but they've captured my lifestyle perfectly!

jk i do mean hate.

Am in the midst of a tedious deep-cleaning process following the fire in my apartment that some of you have heard about. Thankfully, my records did not get any water damage, and, being packed deep into those beautiful white cubes with the little dividers, were exposed to smoke only on the spines and tops of the outer sleeves. This is still proving to be an absolute tedious nightmare to clean up and deoderize, and many will be forever discolored but hey - I still have my music.

The upshot for this thread is that in the process of taking everything out of the white cubes for cleaning, I finally noticed a little sticker label identifying the damn things! niels was right to point me to northern Europe - they're Finnish, from the Palaset line made by Treston from around 1972. They're not, as I believed, a Masonite-like wood product, but a very dense plastic that feels like it. This website has a little background, and a brochure that suggests that my cubes are the K-05 model; flipped on their side, they could accept little drawers! Unfortunately, they're not quite the ubiquitous bargain find one might hope; here's a motley lot of sixteen cubes that went for $1,116.

Borrowing from niels, I searched "palaset bogkasser" and immediately found a pleasing period ad. What a font!

https://i.pinimg.com/474x/dd/0a/1c/dd0a1cda094c4ec6f5ab0bdbbda3ca3b--cubes.jpg

Haha, that's a beautiful font indeed.

Glad to hear you solved the mystery, if not the problem at hand. Sorry to hear about the fire, hope you're OK.

thanks, niels. it was a pretty hard blow at the time and it's been a very weird couple of months. settling into a new place, and the process of cleaning and deodorizing the stuff i could salvage is now, if not quite near the end, at a point where i can conceive of it being over at some point. all things considered it could have been worse. we did, however, lose our cat, the one pictured upthread in my first images of the storage cubes. so that's pretty much shitty. but it's getting easier to just remember the good times, etc.

I'm sorry for your loss, that's a beautiful cat.

Maybe the Palaset solution doesn't have to be so expensive, this lot went for 200 USD a few years ago https://www.lauritz.com/da/auktion/ristomatti-ratia-reolsystem-palaset-15/i3727324/

If you ever come to Denmark, I'll hook you up with some Danish "bogkasser"...

Thanks, niels.

looked up the ones mizzell posted upthread, with the hilarious staging. you can read more here but the kicker is: "Maximum load 30 lbs (recommended)." That would explain the rather thinly-populated collections seen in the photos, but it does make it sort of hard to grok them as "Vinyl Record Storage Cubes."

We’ve been rocking the face-out look on our record shelves for some years (it makes the wall much more interesting) but we never thought to go red / green festive for Xmas before.

Don’t know why @halfpintpress only just thought to do this this Christmas. It looks gooood. pic.twitter.com/ouUG5nxhde

— Jenn Phillips-Bacher (@MrsAudiac) December 19, 2018

love this set-up that paul has

https://i.imgur.com/ltCnLGr.png

wondering how people would store their records if money and space weren't an issue. i feel like these days i daydream more about perfect shelving than i do about rare records.

wow, my 13-year-old Flickr photos are still upthread

I am very very happy with my shelving situation, I have the two shown above and one I built myself.

I need a better solve for my 45s, but the cliche ikea shelves have been way more satisfying than my mid century furniture solution especially now that my collection is way too big.

I got a nice color/texture for the ikea shelves too, so that helps but I started to panic that the heavyass vinyl was going to start ruining the midcentury stuff it was jammed in, so switching years ago to the ikea was a huge relief.

I also ended up building wooden 45 boxes by hand, you can see them in one of the photos above

i'm still keeping the fire burning on Flickr. as much as successive administrations have screwed up the site, nothing else does the job.

love Paul's setup. if money and space weren't an issue, i'd want something along those lines... i've been thinking lately about wanting everything more or less at eye level. not sure i need the two adjacent turntables though, and perhaps more underneath the the next bays of countertop...

my ikea cube storage is okay but has gotten dinged over the years and significantly less sturdy, so a bit wobbly. probably due to 5 or 6 moves in addition to the burden of holding all those heavy records.

i think i need a better media storage solution generally, maybe a bit like what scott seward posted back in '09, although not quite as extensive.

i was asking a woodworker friend about real-wood solutions and the price he quoted me for a pretty basic solution was just insane to me. i guess custom wood furniture has always been for wealthy people.

A friend built a 45 drawer set for my store; it works so well I want one for my own 45s. Half-assed pics here:

https://www.instagram.com/p/ClWK6EeLVNq/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

I think the materials were like 2 sheets of plywood plus 3 sets of drawer sliders.

other than building my own shelving out of old recycled timber i've had luck converting old furniture into lp receptacles. last one was a 1 metre long set of drawers where all i had to do was knock out the piece of wood between the two bottom drawers, add some structural support and it ended up being a perfect fit (also left me with a handy drawer at the top!)

It's pretty hard to beat the ikea shelves. I've added masonite backings to mine to make them sturdier and to keep the records from shifting back too far. With the backing on I'm comfortable stacking them. I have several sets of the 2x4 units stacked three high.

I forgot to mention these insane shelves that a carpenter friend just recently built for my dead friend's record collection, which I have temporarily inherited. Check it out, they are done mortise-and-tenon style, with no nails or screws. Salvaged white pine.

https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/ah265/DJsleeve/IMG_1298.jpg?width=320&height=320&fit=bounds
https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/ah265/DJsleeve/IMG_1299.jpg?width=320&height=320&fit=bounds

whoops

https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/ah265/DJsleeve/IMG_1299.jpg?width=320&height=320&fit=bounds

Thanks! It’s our living room; my wife is cool as hell. She was a little put out when I put the stereo gear in the fireplace, but we live in Georgia. When the hell are we ever going to need a fireplace?

That’s a life-size self-portrait in bronze, btw.

i initially thought it was a mannequin! your response to my joke had me perplexed :)

i bought my ikea shelves used on craiglist. they have never been super nice. after moving about four or five times, they're plenty dinged up and not at all sturdy.

i don't need anything super fancy. in fact, i've been looking to construct something similar to the shelves in bulb's link. just something simple, economical, and sturdy for all my books and records.

a friend recently spent $5k on two shelves that probably hold around 1000 records? they look awesome but

jeez, I built my own shelf that holds more than that for maybe $200 in materials

you should post new pics so we can see how they're holding up after 14 years

those are the old ones, they look the same. the new one is prob built to the same general specs as shelf #2 above, but with real wood not particle board, it's a tank

just recently got hold of 15 metres of old recycled oak boards which will soon house the rest of my lps currently residing in boxes with some room to spare (i hope!)