Hobby Zone Modular System
Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2019 8:44 am
As some of you may have seen from the Postie thread I've taken the plunge and ordered up some Hobby Zone units in an attempt to try and get my workspace into some kind of order. I've seen a couple of questions about these units so thought I'd post up a quick thread to show what you get in the boxes and how they go together.
I ordered mine directly from Hobby Zone in Poland and this is what turned up from UPS a few days later
Each box is well packed out with bubble-wrap to protect the components
Here are the components for one of the units - these are primarily well cut mdf pieces
And the instruction sheet
Obviously the instruction sheets for the more complex units are a little more involved and did require some studying
I'm sure people with better equipped workshops than me will be able to use clamps etc, but for my purposes all the units were put together using strong wood glue and then held in place with decorators masking tape until everything was set.
A few hours of sticking and taping produced a pile of wood like this
Each set also comes with a set of magnets
These are used to give a connection between the units without being permanent, but obviously some thought has to go into this to make sure you've got the right magnetic poles lined up. One note here is that the instructions show a hammer used to put the magnets in place... metal hammer with magnets proved a challenge; so I used a large screwdriver to hold the magnet in place along the tip of the blade and then tapped it into place via the handle. The only other thing to note is that the holes for some of the magnets are really tight so it helped to gouge a slight bevel into the top to help keep them aligned.
After all the tape was removed the major triumph was nothing falling to bits, and again nothing fell out after bashing the magnets in with the aforementioned hammer
The large box on top is a "large" display unit that I'm going to modify slightly to act as a drying box so the actual desk units look like this
From left to right we have four storage hutches which I'll use to store paint sets that I want to keep in the boxes, in the middle we have a corner unit with drawers under a corner unit with shelf and then on the right a 3-drawer unit under a six drawer unit.
The only gotcha that I missed was that the four uprights in the corner unit with drawers aren't all the same - there's two external ones and two internal ones but I missed that and managed to install one of the external uprights inside the unit. The only issue this gives is that there are no magnets on that outside end.
So I hope that helps anyone that's thinking about getting hold of some of these units, I was a little dubious about just using glue to put them all together and I'm sure they could be pinned if you wanted more security but so far they're solid enough as they are. No doubt I'll now spend the next couple of months faffing about with stuff until everything is successfully stored away where I'll never find it again
I ordered mine directly from Hobby Zone in Poland and this is what turned up from UPS a few days later
Each box is well packed out with bubble-wrap to protect the components
Here are the components for one of the units - these are primarily well cut mdf pieces
And the instruction sheet
Obviously the instruction sheets for the more complex units are a little more involved and did require some studying
I'm sure people with better equipped workshops than me will be able to use clamps etc, but for my purposes all the units were put together using strong wood glue and then held in place with decorators masking tape until everything was set.
A few hours of sticking and taping produced a pile of wood like this
Each set also comes with a set of magnets
These are used to give a connection between the units without being permanent, but obviously some thought has to go into this to make sure you've got the right magnetic poles lined up. One note here is that the instructions show a hammer used to put the magnets in place... metal hammer with magnets proved a challenge; so I used a large screwdriver to hold the magnet in place along the tip of the blade and then tapped it into place via the handle. The only other thing to note is that the holes for some of the magnets are really tight so it helped to gouge a slight bevel into the top to help keep them aligned.
After all the tape was removed the major triumph was nothing falling to bits, and again nothing fell out after bashing the magnets in with the aforementioned hammer
The large box on top is a "large" display unit that I'm going to modify slightly to act as a drying box so the actual desk units look like this
From left to right we have four storage hutches which I'll use to store paint sets that I want to keep in the boxes, in the middle we have a corner unit with drawers under a corner unit with shelf and then on the right a 3-drawer unit under a six drawer unit.
The only gotcha that I missed was that the four uprights in the corner unit with drawers aren't all the same - there's two external ones and two internal ones but I missed that and managed to install one of the external uprights inside the unit. The only issue this gives is that there are no magnets on that outside end.
So I hope that helps anyone that's thinking about getting hold of some of these units, I was a little dubious about just using glue to put them all together and I'm sure they could be pinned if you wanted more security but so far they're solid enough as they are. No doubt I'll now spend the next couple of months faffing about with stuff until everything is successfully stored away where I'll never find it again
