CSIRO National Soil Archive

Building 208, Black Mountain, ACT

CSIRO needed long-term storage for a na­tion­al­ly important soil col­lec­tion without letting moisture drift. Boscotek high-density drawers were mounted on a mobile rolling system so the archive gained capacity without a larger room.

Laboratory systemsHigh-density cabinets
CSIRO National Soil Archive
0
Sample containers
0
Boscotek drawers
0
Bottles per drawer
0
kg UDL per drawer

The brief

The National Soil Archive at Black Mountain holds samples that must stay at a stable moisture content for decades. CSIRO tendered for design, man­u­fac­ture, in­stal­la­tion and com­mis­sion­ing of a rolling storage system for Building 208.

The answer was a combined system: a mobile rolling basement for aisle com­pres­sion, and Boscotek high-density drawers for the bottles them­selves. The drawers were the part of the brief that needed a 120 kg and 200 kg UDL rating and a cycle life measured in the hundreds of thousands of op­er­a­tions. Man­u­fac­ture was Aus­tralian, by Wilson & Gilkes.

Numbered mobile bays with Boscotek high-density drawers at CSIRO

Mobile bays, Boscotek drawers

What was installed

Boscotek drawers take 120 kg or 200 kg UDL and were cycle-tested past 150,000 op­er­a­tions. That is the duty cycle of an archive that is opened, not a cupboard that is filled once.

The mobile rolling system un­der­neath compacted the aisles. Numbered bays keep retrieval pre­dictable in a store that holds more than a hundred thousand con­tain­ers.

The installed system holds 145,200 con­tain­ers (2 kg each) in 3,300 drawers, 44 bottles to a drawer.

High-Density Cabinets

High-Density Cabinets

The same drawer system specified when the load and the cycle count are the brief.

Combination Cabinets

Combination Cabinets

Drawers and cupboard space in one footprint for mixed lab­o­ra­to­ry stores.

The outcome

CSIRO gained a soil archive that stores the col­lec­tion at density, keeps retrieval on a numbered bay system, and puts the sample weight on drawers built for that load.

Australian manufacturing, then and now

These systems were designed and man­u­fac­tured in Australia by Wilson & Gilkes. Today, Boscotek continues that man­u­fac­tur­ing lineage as part of OPIE Man­u­fac­tur­ing Group, from 109 Russell Street, Emu Heights NSW 2750.

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Boscotek still builds high-density drawers for archives, laboratories and production stores.

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