As the person in charge of the organisation of the workshop at Tested HQ, Sean was in need of a better model paint storage solution than just chucking them all in plastic tubs.
The idea behind these paint racks is pretty simple: Sean wanted them to be able to sit at the back of the workbench, under the pegboards, and be more space saving than most commercial options. The benefits of laser cutting these kinds of projects allows you to customise them to the dimensions of different paint brands; making them shorter, or taller, and etching a label onto the sides so you're not having to figure out which shelf is for which brand. He also spent a fair amount of time measuring individual bottles, allowing him to adjust the height of the support, making every label easily read at a glance.
The key thing to remember when designing projects that slot together is that the most important measurement is the one that you can control. In this case, the length of the slot has been drawn and laser cut with an extremely tight tolerance to aid stability, while the height of the slot needed to allow for wiggle room to account for variances in material thickness. The parts that stack together have also been designed to share a cut line, meaning that they all slot together perfectly.
I live in a fairly hobby intensive household, and this is a project we've been intending to take on for a while now. We'll certainly be taking a few cues from Sean when we design our own!
You can follow Sean Charlesworth on Twitter to see more of his projects, and you can catch more from the whole Tested team on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.