Vertical carousel for CDs?

[joecarrow]

Hey all, I have a new project idea!

I have seen vertical carousels for use in material handling settings- I bet that McMaster Carr has about a million of them for all those little boxes of screws- but I've never seen one at Ikea.

Anyway, My wife has a plastic CD carousel that stacks something like 50 CDs high, from almost ground level to about three feet up. The problem is that it really takes up a lot of space to hold 200 CDs. It has a base on it that rotates around, and it gets caught on things if it doesn't have a good circle around it. To top it off, my wife has a hard time reaching too low from her wheelchair, and honestly I'd like it if I didn't have to get down on my knees to find a CD either. An obvious solution would be to put the whole thing up on a pedestal, but it's heavy and ugly, and we'd rather not.

I think that a great idea would be to get all of the CDs into a vertical carousel, like a ferris wheel in an oval track, and motorize the thing so that we can double our capacity with something 5ish feet high and not worry about whether she can reach the ones up high or down low. If the CDs are on horizontal shelves that move vertically, I think we could save a lot of space.

In this thread I would like to ask you all- have you seen something like this before? Did somebody just build it, or is there really a place you can go and buy it? This is also where I will post photos and design information as I work towards a finished product.

[Dennis H]

Drawers make more sense to me.

[joecarrow]

Hmm... drawers with some nice bearings- you might be onto something- no need to plug anything in. I'll check the geometry to see which makes more sense. I was thinking of going this way to make the most of the floor space in our tiny apartment.

[joecarrow]

I've measured, and this rotating carousel is about 16 inches across. To be conservative, I could fit a shelf with about 35 CDs wide and 3 deep, facing up, in the same footprint. I could fit three or four CDs high in the easy-reach zone. That works out to something like 420 CDs in easy reach.

Thanks, Dennis- you helped me see something obvious. Although it would have been fun to design and build, I could double our CD collection with a lot less trouble by using drawers. I think the reason I didn't even consider drawers is that whenever I've seen something with drawers for CDs, they just let the drawer slide with no bearings. That's fine for you and me, but she needs a light sliding motion. All I need to do now is to find some good bearings with rollers. It'll be less fun to brag about, but a good deal more likely to get built in a timely fashion.

[Dennis H]

Go to your local hardware store and ask about drawer slides. They're like metal channels with plastic rollers. One part mounts to the drawer and the other part mounts to the cabinet. The good ones have the length and strength so the whole drawer can pull out of the cabinet without falling down.

[PMazz]

Accuride 3832 are the design everyone else has copied. 100lb load rating and full or over extension. I recommend the latter for CDs.

Pete

[technimac]

Pete hit the nail on the head.
I've used Accuride and Blum rollers in many applications, and the Accuride 3832 are quiet and smooth-operating, full-extension drawer rollers. :T
Blum full-extension drawer guides are not as smooth and quiet as the Accuride ones are.



Accuride also makes the 3864, an over-travel slide that actually extends the drawer back 1'' beyond full extension (handy if you have a counter top that extends past the cabinet face), allowing you to store and retrieve CD cases at the back of the drawer. :W
HTH, Bruce

[servicetech]

We put our DVD's/CD's in a "giant bookshelf" 2x6's arranged like a bookshelf w/a 4x8 piece of hardboard on the back. Mounted it on the wall behind a door where the space would be otherwise wasted. Most commonly watched/listened to DVD's/CD's on the middle shelfs, rarely watched VCR tapes on the top shelfs, and toddler toys on the bottom shelfs.

[cjd]

Or, you know... a Squeezebox

All my CD's are being migrated to Slappa cases that'll sit in the bookshelf (120 per case). Gotta keep the CD's because that's your license paperwork in effect. But they don't have to be in the jewel cases any more.

[chasw98]

Not quite as elegant but very space saving is to use these. With these looseleaf CD/DVD organizers, you can fit approx 20 sheets easily into a 2 inch locking ring binder from Office Depot and store 80 CD's per binder. 10 inches of shelf space will hold 400 discs.

[technimac]

These are pretty good as well. Saves a lot of space and CD's can be accessed easily.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=14045&vpn=NGEAR-96CDCASE-V2&manufacture=nGear%20Technologies%20Inc.&promoid=1088

~Bruce

[cjd]

Archiving CD's is only a viable solution. I do not believe they're functionally useful if you actually USE your cd's regularly as your playback source.

Maybe it's just me.

C

[JoshK]

Or, you know... a Squeezebox

All my CD's are being migrated to Slappa cases that'll sit in the bookshelf (120 per case). Gotta keep the CD's because that's your license paperwork in effect. But they don't have to be in the jewel cases any more.

That is what I did....took a seriously long time to rip my 1000+ CD collection to harddrives, but I did it (over the course of many months). Now when I get new music it takes just a few moments (~10mins) to add to my music server.

Because it takes so painfully long to rip, I was sure to use RAID 5 configuration and then back that array up as well.

[chasw98]

Archiving CD's is only a viable solution. I do not believe they're functionally useful if you actually USE your cd's regularly as your playback source.

Maybe it's just me.

C

I agree with you completely about archiving. All of my CD's are ripped to Linux boxes with lossless encoding and I keep approx 200 DVD's on the drives also. Much more convenient and no stooping to reach them . But I also have over 2 TB of storage right now.