Repurposed file cabinets

[andyvh1959]

I was at the local Restore shop here in Green Bay today. As usual they have a good group of steel file cabinets. I was looking them over to consider an application in my cycle shop. But of course an issue of standard file cabinets is the drawer vertical depth. Has anyone found a way to repurpose the file cabinet drawers into something of less depth to incorporate into a workbench?

I thought perhaps, get two four drawer vertical file cabinets, cheap, $10 each:
1. Remove the drawers and slides from the cabinet complete,
2. Cut the front face of the drawer down to the same height as the sides,
3. Form a lip on the front face to finish off the cut line,
4. Cut up the cabinet steel to form mounting surfaces for the reworked drawer
into a workbench,
5. Install the reworked drawers into the workbench, like two high and four wide with a storage shelf under the pullout drawers.

Anyone else have an interesting repurpose of common steel file cabinets?

 

[kbs2244]

if you have the fab skills it would be a workable project
post PICs
it will be popular

 

[Lynden]

Build wood lift-out drawer boxes which sit on the sides of the existing drawers. A rabbet along the bottom of the sides of each box would position it inside the drawer and keep it from moving around. Each drawer could have one box the depth of the drawer, or two shorter boxes.

 

[andyvh1959]

This guy has a cool approach to using the large long file cabinets:

Add a set of slides and build a shallow drawer above the larger drawer. Neat use of space, and many of these style cabinets are nearly free to pick up.

Could even put a drawer catch on the inside of the large drawer to pull the smaller one out. Then release that latch to push the shallow drawer back in if needed.