Caffeine Priority: A simple, affordable do-it-yourself project to make LensRacks even better

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posted Sunday, August 14, 2016 at 5:59 AM EDT

Wake up with IR! Here's today's cup of Caffeine Priority...

I recently reviewed LensRacks, an easy-to-use and effective solution for organizing your lenses, flashes, camera bodies and more. I really liked the product, but felt like it could be made better by attaching it to a movable base. So I built one with around US$20 of materials, many of which you might already have laying around.

Basically, I wanted something with handles that would reinforce the LensRacks rails and allow me to easily move them from place to place. Using a sanded and painted 1 1/2" thick, 7" x 27" piece of wood as the base, attaching a pair of metal handles and a few pieces of felt on the bottom, I had the perfect foundation for the LensRacks. Attaching the rails to the wood was easy as well, requiring just four 1 3/8" flathead screws.

Assuming you have no materials on hand, the total costs would be about US$20. That's US$4 for the wood, US$6 for the handles and screws, US$3.50 for the paint (an eight-ounce sampler), US$4 for a pack of sandpaper and US$2 for the flathead screws. Many of you may have a small piece of lumber or plywood, paint and screws available already. You might not want handles like I did either, so there's a good chance you can make a LensRacks base without having to buy any new materials.

The handles are spaced just far enough from the rails to allow me to remove the end caps in case I need to change the order or quantity of lens/accessory holders on the rails.

LensRacks is great, and I like it even better now that I've got the wood base for it. It's an awesome way to organize lenses, so check it out.

Caffeine Priority is a series of short photo-tidbits to ease you into your day, and give us a chance to share a bit more of what life’s like here at IR. We're more like a group of friends testing and talking about cameras and lenses than the buttoned-down, big-corporation world that some of our photo-friends at other companies work in; hopefully these little snippets will share some of that. So... grab another coffee and join in the conversation with us down below!