Akro-Mils Steel Parts Storage Cabinet Organizer, 28-Drawer

Nice box to store my easy to chip carbide cutting tools. There are separators and stickers inside one drawer : everything to sort sizes, and display
dimensions. Box are stakables and can be also fixed to a wall.

good solid unit

This is a terrific little parts cabinet. The drawers are deep. It came with lots of dividers. The front of the drawer is ‘completely’ enclosed – not airtight, but closed – so it should do a good job keeping dust and dirt out. There’s a small window on each drawer, which may or may not help depending on what’s stored within. There’s also a spot for a label. It came with label cards, but I tossed them in favor of PTouch labels. The housing is steel, square, and free from obnoxiously sharp edges. It has divots on the top for stacking other cabinets on top of it (don’t rely on these to hold the stacked cabinet in place, it’s more of an alignment feature). Way, way, way better than those cheap all-plastic parts bins. I liked it enough that I ordered another size as well – so if you see this review twice, you’ll know why!

Excelent. Very good kit to organize small objects like screws, nuts, washers, etc. The drawers are widely long and can be easily divided with the dividers that it brings, so that you can place different things in the same drawer without them mixing. The structure is strong and at the same time beautiful in appearance.

I bought three of these in different sizes to replace a chaotic, disordered collection of accumulated sets of mostly plastic small parts drawers. I have been hunting literally for YEARS for small parts drawers with a steel, not plastic, frame, because the plastic ones warp under the weight of their contents and stick and bind.

Don’t let your eye be fooled by the photos. These drawer units are larger than they look. Typical plastic drawer units are five to six inches deep. These are 11 inches deep , 11 inches tall, and 17 inches wide. Make sure you allow enough space for them.

The Akro-Mils drawers are not the typical clear polystyrene of cheaper units, they are HDPE or something of that nature, but with a small clear window in the front. Don’t worry that the window is small. You’ll mostly rely on the labels anyway. The drawers slide easily, don’t fall free without you deliberately lifting them out, and don’t stick, but you may find when you first get them that the pack of label cards has slipped into some awkward spot that makes it difficult to fish them out and may block some drawers.

The labels are the weakest point of these drawers. Instead of shipping a different size exact-fit label for each size drawer, Akro-Mils chose to devise a multiply perforated one-size-doesn’t-really-fit-anything-well label sheet. The result of this is that you’ll have to carefully figure out where to tear the sheets to get the right size label for each size drawer, and depending which size drawers you bought, you will be throwing away almost two thirds of each sheet. This one piece of short-sighted laziness with the labels is infuriating enough that I docked Akro-Mills a star just for that. It is literally the only thing wrong with these drawers, and it is pointlessly stupid, because it cannot be saving Akro-Mils more than literally a few cents per set of drawers. Even the placement of the performations is wasteful; I’m sure with a little more thought they could have placed them such that it was possible to get two of the smallest size labels off each strip. I can guarantee you this tear-apart multi-size label idea idea came from an accountant, because no engineer would come up with anything so inefficient and wasteful.

Seriously, Akro-Mils, just give us single-size label cards that actually FIT and that we don’t have to tear apart, OK?

These drawer units are not cheap. Personally I think they are possibly overpriced for what they are. It certainly grates to have to pay this much just to get small-parts drawers that aren’t plastic junk, even though the Akro-Mils units are substantially larger than I was actually expecting. But the alternative is cheap plastic garbage. Sooner or later it comes down to a choice: You grimace and pay the price, or you hold your nose and settle for the garbage. But if you choose the cheap plastic option, you’ll be dealing with that for many years … so choose wisely.

Love this great product