Repurposed

So I have tons of old taped shows kicking around on VHS and I have been debating on what to do with them for ages. I never watch them, and I can't really imagine a charity taking them and they're not recyclable. I did a lot of research online and the best recycling option I found was a company in the states that accepts the tapes and shreds them for other stuff I think. To do that you have to box up all your tapes and mail them to them. AND you have to pay them a fee. As much as I'd like to be able to recycle them I don't have a ton of cash kick around to pay a large sum of money to have the things destroy and somehow recycled. Anyway, I've been thinking about ways to make stuff out of the tapes for awhile now and today decided to just go for it and make some shelves.

The plan? I didn't really have one. I did however venture out to Walmart for some supplies. The supplies? A drill (Now I have a drill!), some duct tape, crazy glue and braces (those L shaped bracket thingys). Before I started I decided that it would have to be a narrow set of shelves to hold small things and pocket books because doubling up on the tapes seemed like it would be too unstable. And if even I can figure out it was going to be really unstable than it seems like it would have been a REALLY bad idea. At least without lots of extra bracing and support. And I really wanted to use as little extra material as possible.





That's all the gear and a mocked up prototype is in the centre.

So the basic idea i had was to use the brackets to put the tapes together. In theory this is a good idea and how shelves are made. In practice it didn't go so well. So hard plastic doesn't accept screws too well. It cracks.















Undeterred I didn't think a few cracks were too bad. But, not thinking ahead it turned into this:




















You can't drill stuff in side ways. And I have an extra tape propped against my foot trying to support the top while i attempted to screw in the bottom. That lead to this:

















At this point I kind of gave up on the bracket idea and grabbed the tube of crazy glue. About 15 minutes later I had this:




















And finally:




















I'm pretty darn happy with the results. After the 2nd layer I moved the whole operation to it's final place. I'm not sure how stable the whole arrangement is actually going to be. Krazy Glue is not infallible. But I plan on adding a second shelf alongside this one tomorrow. I considered leaving the other shelf of tapes in their cases (because then I could still watch them), but vetoed the idea for now. For a few reasons: 1. I haven't watched a single one of those tapes in at least five years. 2. I think the black and white tapes look good and 3. I'm pretty sure pulling a tape out of the case to watch it will cause major damage to the already minimal structural integrity.