The kitchen in our hacker space needed a better solution for its spices. The wire frame shelf was disorganized and just not that great over all. Turns out you can get some nice tin cans for spices for just like 70ct each - already coated in black paint that can easily be laser-etched away. Now we just needed a new kind of rack that holds a lot of them. The obvious solution would be tilting them so you can read what's on the lid and each can be accessed directly. I was already thinking about a variant of the wine rack just with each cell tilted upward. But then there was a better idea: Have the cans sink into a horizontal plate:
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Although the rack is made specifically for the black cans it turns out other more or less cylindrical objects of more or less the same size also fit in well enough.
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While getting the math right and creating the ellipse arcs was a bit tricky the rack itself is easy to assemble:
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The generator can be found in the Shelves section.
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Yes, yes it is. Although the pictures don't really show how small it is. If you follow the arrow here you can have a look at the kitchen still with the old spices rack and much more freshly renovated as it is now: https://tour.hackerspace-bamberg.de/
While it looks like the cans are balancing kinda peculiarly on the rack they are actually sitting there pretty stable. They are sunk in almost half way at the end. That's where the weight is for most cans. So the center of gravity is very little above the actual shelf.
We of course also screwed the shelf firmly to the wall.
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That's one well equipped kitchen for a hacker space :)
My only concern would be: hitting it from below with your hands would send many of the cans flying. Will happen sooner or later while cooking :)
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