Milk crates are great for use as storage containers. They hold lots of stuff while piling into a tall stack, allowing you to store a good load of gear while taking up very little floors pace. Problem is, everything goes into the singular compartment, making it difficult to do any proper organization, especially for hand tools, fastening hardware, and other small items. The Sidiocrate takes the traditional milk crate and makes it a better storage container.
No, it doesn’t look exactly the milk crates your mom used to store your old stuff in her attic. Instead, it draws inspiration from the classic container, incorporating the parts that made it great for home storage while adding elements that bridged the gap on its shortcomings.
The Sidiocrate takes the same straight wall with structural ribs that give milk crates such a sturdy structure, allowing it to maximize interior space while supporting heavy amounts of weight when stacked underneath multiple containers. That means, you can use this to hold heavy tools and equipment, while safely stacking with no worries of the whole thing breaking apart. It measures around half the height of a standard 24-quart milk crate, too, allowing you to stack even more cases while taking up the same amount of space. Yes, it won’t hold tall bottles upright the way a standard milk crate does if you want to stack them, but the lowered height does make it more suited for the kind of things people tend to store inside their homes.
Unlike milk crates, the inside of the walls get multiple molded channels, which you can use to add dividers to break apart the erstwhile single large compartment, making it easy to organize smaller items into their designated slots. Those channels run nearly the entire length of the walls, by the way, giving you 43 different placement options, so you can put dividers nearly anywhere you want for maximum flexibility. Yes, they do sell plastic dividers sized to fit flush into those channels, although you can definitely use random boards you have at home, provided you can cut them to the proper size.
The Sidiocrate comes with cutout handles on each end similar to milk crates, making it easy to carry the container by hand, while a perforated bottom helps shave off a good load of weight. Using it to store small hand tools that can go through the perforations? Not a problem, as they also sell a bottom mat that can cover up the perforations, although, again, you can use any random board you have at home that will fit flush inside the compartment.
Keeping sensitive stuff inside the case? Well, you can purchase a plastic lid that snaps onto the top of the container. According to the outfit, the system remains completely stackable whether a case has a lid or not. The case measures 18.5 x 12.5 x 6.5 inches (width x depth x height), with the height going up by half an inch if you snap on a lid. Each container, by the way, can hold 200 pounds’ worth of gear each.
The Sidiocrate is available now, priced starting at $20.