Featured Old homemade coin cabinet with potential

This was a secretary's desk that I turned into a coin cabinet.
I have finished 3 of the six drawers.

 

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Coin cabinets, while pretty, don’t offer any protection against fires.

 

True enough - but my ancient coins are 1800+ years old.. so I am taking my chances.

 

Well - a small update... sorry that this may bump the thread.. but I have seen many threads that promise updates on fairly interesting topics but never actually get updated (if this is not interesting to you please excuse me and scroll on...I get it - seriously this is a long, useless post - so move on to the coins!!)

My time has only started to free up over the last few days so I finally had time to take a deep dive into this project and see what I am up against.

Well there are some challenges and it made me wonder if it would have been better if I just build my own cabinet and not try this retrofit... but I am committed to make this work - it will be fine (so I keep telling myself).

Firstly a few disclaimers: I am NO carpenter. I have no training .. this will not be a masterpiece...I work in I.T... need I say more? I built a bar for my "man-cave" - it turned out awesome as far as I am concerned - but any true craftsman will need me to feed him a few beers before he would say "good job". I do not work with expensive hardwood and light colored stain.. for the simple reason that I screw up too much and wood filler/ paint/ clear coat covers the sins... seriously my standards are low.

Here's the bar.... oh if it could talk!


On to the cabinet... it had old time casters that were trimmed in (added after the cabinet was made) on the bottom. It was too tall for my liking. My wife wanted a "sofa table".. basically to sit behind the couch in front of this bar (at the moment I plan to extend the cabinet with shelves on each side..). So removing the casters and the trim that was added to cover them brought the cabinet to the correct height. Perfect.
I then sanded, cleaned, painted and clear coated the interior:



Then I worked on one drawer.. trying to get one right and determine how best to tackle the rest.. (this is how they came):



Painted and added some felt..



Thin birch ply and cut some holes ... a bit big I think?



Add sesterii... need to clean up that finish - not good... but you get the idea.
This drawer is all about trial and error.




*Then try to slide the drawer back in the cabinet... and no, don't fit. The drawers were so tight that adding the paint/clear coat was a problem. I am more of
a brick layer than a cabinet maker. So it looks like I will have to run each drawer
through the router first - shave them a bit and I'll be good (ish). Looking at the pics now the drawer looked better without the black..haha? It's all a work in progress.

There are 78(!) drawers in this cabinet..

One cool thing happened... I pulled the drawers and lifted up the cabinet and heard a clink!!.. is that a coin? It is! Definitely.. has to be a aureus right?? I was so confident that I would never have to work again!!



Oh well... back to the salt mines.... but nice patina!!

It's certainly it's a pretty cool find and connection with whomever made the cabinet and collected coins in the past.

I will ensure that the penny stays with the cabinet and has a prominent place in one of the drawers.

Cheers!

 

So glad you're keeping us up to dat with the progress

 

Great progress, Sean! I love hearing about the ups and the downs of the project, and very cool about the clink you heard and coin you found!

 

You have done better than I ever could. I have little patience for woodwork.

Thanks for the update, look forward to more.

 

Quick update...



On the left side of the cabinet I decided to go with larger drawers ..so made some drawer fronts and will use my Lighthouse style trays.. as so:



Still need to trim them in, paint, finish and make them look nice.

Sticking with the original thin drawers for the right side.. as so:



Still need to paint, finish and add red felt to those.

So overall there will be 58 drawers total and the final cabinet will hold between 926 - 1026 coins... final number depends on the size of the compartments in the remaining Lighthouse trays I order. Would love to hit 1000 coins in capacity - just sounds cool!

Progress has been slow due to the sheer amount of drawers.. when I make a change or adjustment I am doing it many, many times.

Like that thin plywood - cutting out the coin holes was a lot of work (a serious amount of time consuming, mind numbing work!)



But most of that grunt work is behind me now and I can see a bit of light at the end of the tunnel....

The final cabinet will be extended on both sides with book shelves.. the external color and finish will be decided by the wife and the kids have requested that a phone charging station be included somehow! Anyway I will show this again when major changes take place.

Cheers!

 

Wow that's top shelf.I must up my game.

 

WOW, looking good.

 

@Clavdivs: looks good! Keep us posted

 

That is looking great! Cant wait to see the finished product.

 

Nice work! I think you will have an excellent looking cabinet for your coins.

 

This is a coin cabinet that is NOT used. The reason is that the trays are stacked vertically upon a center rod.
Random tray selection is not possible. If I wanted to get coins in the bottom tray, I would have to lift out all trays above it. I guess the original owner wanted to keep coins at home in something a thief would not recognize as a coin cabinet. It is locked by a key inserted into the top knob. Pretty though. Picked it up at an antique store in Massachusetts in about 1970.
Dr. Ted Buttrey (R.I.P.) had several of various beautiful designs.

 

Apparently this might be the time to buy an antique coin cabinet. I was checking and the antiques market is basically in free fall. Millennials, who are highly mobile and prefer simplicity, don't want 19th or 18th century furniture, and the baby boomer collectors are dying... flooding the antique market.

It goes to show you that just because something is going up in price, doesn't mean it will be very collectible and valuable indefinitely. Maybe in 20 or 30 years our own hobby could be 1/3 the size it is now and the prices could end up reflecting that. Look at what's happened to some sub-categories of the US coin collectors market already. For example, antique US commemorative coins have plummeted in value by as much as 2/3 over the last decade. Heck, look at what happened to US stamps. These days it's cheaper to buy unused 1950s through 1980s u.s. stamps in bulk than buying brand new stamps are the post office, which is why some people I know use old stamps to mail stuff rather than modern stamps. Except for some of the rarer stamps, the stamp collector market has collapsed.

 

Don't equate the stamp market with the sale of bulk rate postage. People like Frank R have been saving by buying discount postage for years already, but that's not about building a collection. For years people have speculated on buying postage in bulk at face, on the assumption that it would always be worth face value. They never imagined that it would be bought and sold by dealers AT A DISCOUNT, but that was being done in the 60s already with 3c sheets bought in the 40s and 50s. The bulk rate on higher denomination stamps is holding its own, but the low denomination stamps are giveaways since an envelope has only so much room. That was never about collecting, and it is false to equate it with philately.

As with coins, the real market barometer is not in the bulk market but rather with the major auction houses. In a boom economic market they are raking it in but on different types of material than 20-30-40 years ago. So what else is new? Unless you are really a market speculator at heart, have no more fear about the stamp market than you do for the market in ancient coins. The advice today is the same as ever: if you are looking to make a profit, you can do better elsewhere. Collecting has a bottom line, but the gist of it all is not about the bottom line.

 

I've just purchased this 20 drawer cabinet on eBay, it needs some restoration which I will do.
I drive to Liverpool tomorrow to pick it up.

 

Well @daveydempsey that's a beauty!!! MUCH better than what I started with.
Also those tags in the drawers would make for some interesting reading as well. I hope you update us on your progress!

I am about 2 weeks away from finishing my project. and will post pics then.