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Tinkering: 2026-01-10: Thread Box
With a new hobby come new desires. One of my new desires that emerged
from the sewing hobby was to have a complete set of all
180 different colours of silk sewing thread of a well-known brand. A quick
inventory recount revealed that we already had 96 different colours.
Not bad at all! But knowing that there were 84 others out there
became more and more unbearable.
So I finally gave in to my desire, and soon after ordering the rest from two different web shops (none of them had all colours, and my trusted local store did not have all silk colours either), I was left with a pile of unsorted reels of thread which was difficult to cope with, both in terms of storage as well as for comparing them to find the right colour for a project.
Naturally, the next project presented itself: I had to build a suitable thread box.
The most important would be to have efficient space utilisation,
because we already have a lot of crap and trying to store and present
180 reels of beautiful
thread nicely posed a danger of spending too much space for each reel.
Also, I wanted to be able to put more stuff on top of the box, like a box of tools for sewing, without blocking access to the thread reels, so there could not be a lid. I went for full-extension drawers of tightly packed compartments.
A second important feature would be to be able to see all colours
at once so that comparing them would be easy.
Therefore, the drawers are easily removable.
Without keeping you in suspense any further, here are all the 180 colours!
They take up 4½ of the seven drawers, as each drawer has 40 compartments.
And there are more drawers in the box, so that I can store duplicate reels and also a few other types of thread and more stuff.
The box is built from birch air plywood, which can be very thin, so
that little space is wasted for the structure. And it is quite stiff,
too. I used 2mm thickness for the back and the horizontal compartment
walls, 6mm thickness for the box's side walls, and 4mm for the rest.
For full-extension drawers, auxiliary slides are required, i.e., the drawers cannot directly run inside rails in the box, but there must be another moving part in between. I found no off-the-shelf truly full-extension drawer slides of the right size, so I also had to make them myself.
To avoid running soft wood on soft wood, and probably even rubbing end grain on soft wood, I instead 3D printed these slides. This should reduce wear. The drawers are not heavy at all, so plastic is plenty strong enough.
This is the side view of the box. I made the top, bottom, front, and back
wider so that the box can be handled without having a handle. This was to
avoid clutter (like a handle) on the top, so I can put more stuff onto the box.
These protusions to the side also make the side walls stiffer and straighter – despite being quite hard, plywood still tends to warp a bit.
The box is designed to fit into an air-tight container so that it can be stored
and protected against moths and bugs. Some critters love to eat organic material,
including silk.
The front of the drawers is cut from one piece of plywood, so that the
grain is nicely contiguous. The birch is quite bright, so to show this in the
picture, I used lower brightness and higher contrast.
So is this thread box perfect? No, there would be a lot to improve. The drawer slides are a bit too flimsy, and the 3D prints warp slightly, too. The drawers also derail quite easily (without immediately dropping out, thankfully). And the box is designed a few millimeters too narrow, so it is not as simple as it could be to take out the reels. And this is despite more space in the container. Also, I could have built the compartment grid more accurately by improving the assembly methods. I had to rework and fix a `few' compartments with a chisel. And with a router...
But I won't rebuild this, because that would be wasteful in many ways. The box works fine and does fulfil its purpose, and I am very happy with it.
And I wish you a happy new year!
