IKEA Skuffen to Display Case Joiners

I honestly thought someone else would have done this already - but when I couldnt find it I did it myself.

Ok so the Skuffen is a pretty good idea but it's for shoes and the sides sorta just lean up against it. It might be great for displaying shoes but I wanted to use it for other more important things (like LEGO) but found it a bit loose. So I made a new set of joints that makes it a little more compact and a lot more rigid.

I made these joiners to reuse all the alluvium extrusions and existing panels that are in the IKEA kit. The “sides” are the small and medium lengths which one of them comes with a hole in it because it's for shoes to get in and out, so I changed it so you can have:

1. No side panel (that is what I did so I only needed the top panel and could leave off using the ‘bottom’ with the hole.
2. Fixed side panel (so you have the side panel but it's not removable
3. Magnetic side panel (so you need the clips as well and it uses a 5mm x 3mm round magnets

I added some ‘shelves’ of 4.5mm thick so things can actually sit on them. I laser cut the shelves and just superglued some 5.5mm x 5.5mm blocks of the right length to the extruded columns to prop it up (you could do that directly in a lot of slicers). The shelves I added I included some holes in the back so you can run lighting cables if you have them or need them. If you do not have access to the laser cutter you can always just put no pane and have stuff sit directly on the surface below the case.

For my own use I might come back and add some slots type things to close out the gap on the top to make it more dust ‘proof’.

The trickiest part is making sure you put the extrusions in the right holes as this is a tight fit and you may need a tapping stick (small hammer) to encourage them to go all the way in. I often had to use a piece of wood and a hammer to tap joiners back off without destroying them…. and that is why each of the joiners has a little L, M, S on them. It is easiest to assemble a side" then the front, then tapping the other ‘side’ on all at once. As a tip the IKEA extrusions want the medium sized to be all the way in where as the small and large extrusions will butt up against the medium ones.

I thought about making a magnetic joiner so you could have 2 sitting up right but then realise you would have to be able to get to what is inside too, so if you wanted to do that Id just use 2 no pane sides and push them up against each other.

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Printing help - I had to use slim tree supports after auto orientating for pretty much every part. Some will require brims too. It all comes off pretty easy though.