Hasta La Ideas

Many architecture and ID offices will still have flat file cabinets, the unwieldy steel boxes you see above designed to hold large-sized draftings. My old design job had a room full of these things, holding drawings up to 48″ in length, and I always hated trying to extract a drawing near the bottom of a drawer. You practically had to yank that drawing out like a tablecloth with the place settings on top, without damaging or crumpling the vellum, and the stacks of wrinkle-edged drawings in the flat files testified to the difficulty of this. And when it came to putting back a drawing that belonged on the bottom, forget about it–you had to unload the entire drawer first.

Time and again I thought, There has to be a better way! There is, and I’ve finally found it, though it’s not doing me a damn bit of good now that I no longer work there. Regardless, I present to you the EasiFile:

Looking at it, it seems the EasiFile a lot less space-efficient than traditional flat files, but the manufacturer claims one cabinet will hold the drawings of three flat file cabinets. Presumably the dead airspace in the drawers of a flat file cabinet is removed by the EasiFile’s ability to tightly stack drawings with no space in between.

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