DIY Acrylic Desiccator Cabinet
There’s a lot of value in taking things apart or building something from scratch to fully understand how it works. When mentoring students, I also find that it often helps with teaching useful auxiliary skills that can help supplement the lab skills they are already learning. By involving them in the design and building process, we get to test out our creativity and resourcefulness.
Desiccator cabinets are so useful for storing the chemicals we synthesize and do not require too many new tools to construct. Here, I describe our design process for creating our own sealed box and some basic instructions for how to build one yourself.
This project involves cutting and joining pieces of acrylic, installing metal hardware on acrylic, and sealing a desiccator cabinet so that the humidity in the box is as low as possible. We also had to design and 3D print our own hinges for the door because the commercial ones we had purchased created a large gap between the door and the cabinet!
This design allowed us to use drierite, our desiccant of choice, to lower the humidity in our box to 10%, the lower detection limit of our temperature/humidity detector!
