record storage

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

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

I use these cubes.

They can be ordered with feet and indents on the top for the feet, or just plain. The idea here is you can buy them as you need them, and stack/orient them as space and needs allow. One cube, 20 cubes- no problem.

They're much nicer than the "birch effect" stuff from Ikea, and you can add optional cat-proofing doors made of plexi... I have the doors in clear, orange and blue, and they look really nice together.

There are a few downsides to know about:

Cost, not so cheap. They ship assembled so the shipping is also high. But any "better than Ikea" record storage solution is pricy. And how much did those 80 LPs inside cost you? I've gotten a few from their "Scratch and Dent" sale and they're barely scratched and/or dented, especially if they're one of the inside cubes in a block of them.

Tolerances. These are not, IMO, extremely precisely made. The feet and indentations and probably overall measurements can be +/- a tiny bit, and when you stack them these differences are apparent. So in my particular case, a stack of 3 cubes might be up to 1/8" higher than the stack next to it. And since my stereo stuff is on top of this shelving, and my turntable is wider than one cube, it sits across two cubes at some tiny angle rather than completely flat. Maybe this is stuff for nerds and you don't care. Also living in old ass apartments in big cities, the walls and floors aren't exactly precisely flat either. Bottom line, it's not as clean as one shelving unit. (Upside, it's reconfigurable and able to be bought as you go).

Doors. The doors are a great idea but sometimes they pop out and they have sharp edges. I've gotten some painful cuts from these plexi edges.

All in all I still highly recommend these. I get a lot of compliments on them!

i don't want to be a hater. they do look nice. and it's good when people share their vinyl storage solutions.

but that just seems like an insane price to me.

i can't really think about this topic without feeling profound distress that i can't afford to have anything nice. idk. it's not like i like my ikea shelves

I love my Ikea record shelves. It's something they do right that's fairly durable.

Holy shit, one of those cubes is $190 + shipping, and they're wonky?

I feel like they raised the price over the last 10 years, when I got my first couple. I don't mean incredibly wonky. But when one buys say, a table, they expect the tabletop to be flat right? Maybe my expectations are too high.

Not sure what shipping cost is for 16 cubes but even if it is not that bad it seems like this would cost at least $3500 to replace my particular set up. Plus I forget what it is called but I got a pretty nice faux wood finish color of my ikea piece! It’s not the standard birch... anyway, I’m also happy with mine!

https://ibb.co/85c9FMx

That's my setup. I don't know how to directly link images, apparently. I have another set that you can see intruding into the corner, but they have tchotchkes and art books on them.

I put masonite panels on the backs of all of them to make them sturdier and so the records don't poke out the back, also to cut down on dust. The little bins up top with white cloths on them hold my 45's.

i love that color orange on you

Thanks! That used to be my favorite shirt, shorts and chair.

BrickBox makes a modular cubes similar to what majorairbro posted. Seem to be non-wonky, and cheaper (though still beyond what I'm willing to spend). I think they look great:

https://www.modmobili.com/

(they're Spanish-made, but the link is for the US distributor)

I got two 3x2 units from Target. they were about $100 apiece and look pretty nice. you can then go to Home Depot and buy a piece of wood to nail into the back so there's a backstop.

Cow_Art i'm in awe of your listening room. Serious #goals.

i'm lucky in that I used to be pretty good friends with a guy who did carpentry and interior design. he gave me cost price for a custom birch ply setup with these sorts of cubes, but as drawers, built to the height that you'd want to put turntables on top of. i've still never seen anything like it for sale.

i say "used to" - nothing happened, but he moved to the swedish countryside a few years ago, so it's pretty hard to see him.

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!)