Maker Recreates the Toy Story 2 Cleaner’s Chest as a Real Workshop

Decades after Toy Story 2, the multi-layered chest that appears when the cleaner restores Woody continues to pull makers who want those drawers and compartments to exist outside the animation. Chris Borge, a maker from South Australia focused on digital fabrication and 3D printing, took the idea on as a prototype for a mobile workshop. The project started during a trip to the Flinders Ranges while he worked on a camera build, when the need for a portable setup made the film’s design feel worth testing against real constraints.

Animation ignores a variety of physical constraints that are readily obvious in a real-world build. The drawers in the design are prone to colliding with the compressor and side compartments, and let’s not even get started on how the lid clips just refuse to hold the two parts together when someone attempts to lift the chest by the handle. Borge had the foresight to maintain the general form and sense of precision openings while altering the layout just enough to ensure that the components worked in practice. He used a laser cutter to cut out all of the plywood parts for the main frame, dividers, lid, and drawer boxes, and then printed the extra bits for the mechanisms and fittings.

Assembly entailed gluing the inner frames and dividers together, then fitting a lot of drawers of various sizes, about 18, and installing the lifting mechanism with threaded rods and linear rails that allow for a ball vise for light work. The side doors, a folding support panel, a removable top that also functions as a work table, and a sliding compartment for a smaller air compressor were all fitted at the same time. He ended up utilizing modified hinges, bag locks, and printed spacers to keep everything in place. Then it was just a matter of applying many coats of oil paint, followed by further coats of shellac, to give the surfaces a lovely smooth finish, albeit there was still some adhesive residue in a few places that was interfering with how the stain looked after that.

The finished chest is pure eye candy, with the drawers sliding in and out, the vise adjusting in height, and the secret rack and compressor chamber opening up exactly as they should. While its size makes it not the most portable object in the world, which contradicts the initial goal of making it a mobile workshop, it did have some issues, with only a few things left incomplete. Borge released a STEP file for the prototype and detailed the issues he was still dealing with, and he’s already working on a second version that takes a step back from the film’s intended proportions in favor of something more practical. What this build demonstrates is how valuable digital tools can be, as they took a small animated scene and transformed it into something that opens, slides, and holds tools in a workshop.