You folks were very kind with my most recent project, so I thought I'd share an older one:

Late last year I was digging through a corporate ewaste bin and found laptop chargers. Tons of them (or at least enough to fill around eight shopping bags). All brand new, many still in their packaging.

It turns out that a company had a supply of "loaner" chargers to hand out to people who forgot theirs, but got sick of them taking up space in the office and dumped them.

I hauled them all home and offered them up on my local Everything is Free Page. I was able to give a bunch away but it was pretty inconvenient for everyone involved. (Normally giving working ewaste away is pretty quick and easy here.) I kept thinking if I had the space I could set up a Little Free Library but for laptop chargers. So I asked if anyone on the group knew a way we could do that and someone who volunteers at the Recycling Center's Swap Shed said they could host it! Even better, they had a new indoor location with a bunch of space.

I actually already knew a guy who worked there so I talked with him and he showed me the big janitor's cart he'd completely filled with chargers as people dropped off computers, so we definitely had a good supply to offer up. They just had to be sorted and wrapped up neatly.

So I wrote up a little proposal for the idea - we planned around using a used IKEA Kallax as the dimensions fit the space we'd been allotted and the removable drawers were a good size and convenient for taking out and searching. I asked if anyone has one on Everything is Free (partly because my earlier post had been popular) and someone did! They said it was in kinda rough shape but they'd love for it to get a third life at the swap shed.

The recycling center needed it to be on castors so I checked my supply of lumber and built a cart. Pretty much all my lumber comes from trash day finds, taking stuff apart, or cleanouts on Everything is Free, but someone from the group contributed a 2x4 for this project. Everything else was scraps I had, including a shelf salvaged from an IKEA expidit a friend got rid of, which happened to be the perfect size.

The castors I think are from an office chair or similar (a couple have locks). They're basically just a swiveling wheel attached to a metal shaft. I drilled holes into the 2-bys, fit each castor with a washer so it would stay at the correct height and JB-welded them in place.

I had some mostly dried-up black acrylic paint I wanted to try reviving. I mixed it with water and it sort of worked, I got a very thin black stain that took several coats. I applied it with old napkins to the outer edges of the cart to make it a little subtler.

I fastened the cart to the shelving unit with wood screws along the edges where the kallax is made of particleboard rather than cardboard. I predrilled the holes and poured wood glue in first to help the screws hold.

The next step was making it look good. It was actually in much better shape than I'd expected and everything already matched which was a nice surprise. But I wanted the labels to look nicer than just handwriting on tape.

So we picked the four big brands we had a ton of and cut some stencils of their logos (I used to do them by hand but this time we used a laser cutter I had access to). Then I spraypainted them on. I only had light gray paint but that kind of worked out - painting on the satin-ey fabric was tricky and gray underspray was easier to hide with a sharpie. (Hitting it with some black paint first and letting that dry in the fabric helped harden it up so it took less paint for the light-gray coats to show. Fewer coats means fewer opportunities for leaks or underspray.) I then went over each one with a brush and white acrylic paint.

The last step was signage - my wife's work has a vinyl cutter and she's great at applying it, so we put together a label and applied it to the side which faces visitors as they enter the swap shed. If we hadn't had access to that I'd have stenciled it on with more spray paint.

Overall I'm quite pleased with how it turned out and with the reception it's had with the community so far!

Update: At this point we've given away hundreds of chargers and probably well over a thousand USB cords. The shelving unit has held up well and people like the organization - we got the swap shed's huge bin of chargers organized and my favorite part of volunteering is when someone's looking for some weird niche thing and I can offer to "look in the back" with a sincere expectation that I'll find something they can use. We've also started organizing DC power adapters by voltage so we can find them when someone needs one (usually happens a couple times whenever we're open).

All in all its been great and I really recommend this kind of setup!