Notes from the Workshop

Where's the space you paid for?

Why a traditional drawer system keeps most of the room you bought — and Unit 1 gives it back.

Notes from the Workshop · 5 min read

Here’s the trick a traditional drawer system plays on you: it sells you a big box, then quietly keeps an unnecessarily large amount for itself.

A twin-drawer cargo unit looks like dense, serious storage. Steel frame. Powder coat. Two drawers that glide out with a satisfying clunk. But a surprising amount of what you’re carrying isn’t your gear — it’s the structure built to hold your gear. And you pay for that structure twice: once in weight, and again in the space it eats.

Count what the structure eats

Take a unit built to the same envelope as a BootKamp Unit 1 — 1060 mm wide, 960 mm long, 300 mm tall. That’s about 305 litres of space on paper. Now start subtracting what you never get to load.

The carcass. Most steel drawer systems are built from 25 mm square tube with timber or composite panels. The runners. Two drawers ride on four heavy-duty steel slides; at 20 mm each they swallow 80 mm straight off the width before the drawers even start. The drawer boxes. Each drawer is a second box inside the first, with 10 mm sides — another 40 mm of width gone. The fixed top deck. The lid your fridge sits on caps the height: a 255 mm drawer box gives about 237 mm of usable depth inside, and not a millimetre more, no matter what you’re trying to fit.

Run the numbers honestly and each drawer comes out around 440 mm wide, 864 mm long and 237 mm deep — roughly 90 litres apiece, about 180 litres across both. From a 305-litre envelope, that’s around 40% of the space gone to structure before you’ve packed a single thing.

Then you put boxes inside the boxes

Here’s the part nobody admits. A drawer is a fixed rectangle, but your gear isn’t. So what does everyone do? They drop plastic tubs and crates inside the drawers to stop everything sliding into one chaotic heap. Boxes, inside drawers, inside a carcass, inside your vehicle — and on a cold evening at the end of a long day, you’re lifting the lid, opening the drawer, then digging through the tub to reach the thing at the bottom. Three layers deep.

That’s the real cost, and it isn’t only litres. It’s the weight of a whole steel skeleton you haul to the desert and back. It’s the height cap that means the tall, awkward load — a long recovery tub, an upright fridge, a folded chair — simply won’t go in. And it’s the daily friction of digging through three layers to find one thing.

This is the same complaint the drawer makers can’t quite hide. One well-known Australian brand openly notes that mass-produced steel drawers leave gaps of up to 100–200 mm in length and 100 mm in width around the unit, because they build to standard sizes and pad the rest out with sidewings. Their words, not ours: it wastes a lot of space — and space is the whole point of fitting drawers.

Unit 1 deletes the drawers

BootKamp Unit 1 throws the carcass out entirely. There’s no drawer-within-a-box-within-a-box — just a single full-width floor that spans the whole case — no sides, no back, no second drawer — sliding out on one mechanism as one piece. The “container” is your own pre-packed box or crate, strapped straight to the deck, sized to the space, and pulled out to you in one motion. One layer. Nothing to dig through.

The wins that matter most aren’t marginal. Weight: 25 kg against the 55–75 kg of a steel system — a third of the mass, paid back in fuel, brakes and GVM headroom. Access: one open deck instead of lid-drawer-tub, so everything is reachable from one position without unpacking the load. Height: no fixed deck means no cap — the tall, awkward load that a drawer can never take just sits on the platform. And the space adds up too: from the identical footprint, the open platform gives you more usable volume than the two drawers it replaces, because nothing is spent on a second set of walls or a stack of runners.

That’s the case in one line. A drawer system makes you carry its internals everywhere you go, rations your access, and caps what will fit. Unit 1 carries your gear and nothing else — lighter on the vehicle, instantly reachable in the field, and open to whatever you need to load.

— Vaughan

See Unit 1