Cardboard Mobile Drawer

We have always dreamed of one day owning a portable drawer for my desk at home but didn’t want to spend massive amounts of money ($10) for a cheap product made in China. So we decided to make a portable drawer ourselves. We decided to build the drawer out of reused cardboard because not only is it environmentally friendly but also something that we had lying around.

1. Tape
2. Cardboard
3. Ruler
4. Pencil
5. Wooden board 
6. Scissors 
7. Inventor Software

We started out designing in Inventor first. When we first came up with the idea for this portable drawer, we decided to use Inventor to model what our drawer may look like. We experimented with different sizes and did some measurements in real life to accurately find a design that not only looks good but is also very functional.

For our first step, we cut a big cardboard box into two pieces. These two pieces of cardboard are for the base of the drawer. One piece was bigger than the other so that it could hug the smaller piece. These pieces measured out to be 33 by 22 cm and 30 by 22 cm

Then we measured the front and back parts of the bigger base which came out to be 17 by 8 cm and the smaller back piece of the actual drawer space which we only made one of, 17 by 7 cm.

The next step was to fold the sides to make a rectangular box shape. The sides were folded and were measured to be 16.5 by 22 cm and 14.6 by 22 once connected. These folded cardboard pieces were then taped on the outside to form the shape of a box.

To complete our build we needed to build a knob to pull and push out the box to make it fully functional. We used scissors to cut 5 pieces of cardboard circles roughly the same size that we taped together, then taped them to the front of the drawer.

This is what our finalized build looks like.