Vinyl capacity of Chorus® furniture
How many albums can a Chorus extending shelf actually take? And what’s the weight limit? It’s all here…
How many records can each shelf hold?
Every Chorus extending shelf has a record tray that can take up to 80 ‘standard’ albums, lightly stacked. This equals a maximum load of 20kgs.
What’s a ‘standard’ album?
We measure a standard album as one vinyl record, a paper inner sleeve and a cardboard cover with a 4mm spine. It weighs 250gms, comprising a 160gm vinyl record, plus a cardboard cover and inner sleeve weighing about 90gms.
We measure a double album as containing two vinyl records, two inner sleeves and a gatefold cover with an 8mm spine. This counts as two standard albums. It weighs 500g.
Your collection, of course, will likely contain every variant under the sun and will never conform to those standards (see next answer). It may include, for example, albums with cover spines of greater thicknesses (eg. a single album with a gatefold sleeve) which may reduce the number of albums/vinyl records the shelf can take. You can see this in the picture above – the middle shelf has 59 albums containing a total of 74 pieces of vinyl. It has an unusually high number of single albums with spines in excess of 4mm.
Unlike some record storage furniture providers in this sector, we’ve spent a lot of time researching this and are being comparatively realistic with our average capacities and weights.
We don’t recommend stacking any more than 80 standard albums in a Chorus extending shelf. You’ll lose some finger-flipping enjoyment as the number (and weight) increases too far. However…
Your images show some shelves stacked with more than 80 albums. How come?
Well spotted! Those Chorus shelves comprise almost exclusively non-standard albums pressed and sold in the ’60s and ’70s which - in general - have much thinner record covers and lighter weight vinyl. You can get more of those into the shelf. Here’s an example:
Dave Brubeck’s Greatest Hits issued in 1966 by CBS (62710). The vinyl is super-light at just 92gms! It has a cover with a spine of just 3.2mm. The total weight of this album is a mere 170gms. You can get 100 of these on a shelf (lightly-stacked, not over-stacked) and the total load would be 17kgs. This is obviously not a standard album and it would be wrong for us to claim capacities on the basis of records like it, unlike some vinyl storage furniture makers.
You’ll know for sure that, as vinyl has returned to popularity, labels are releasing and re-releasing albums in beautiful packaging with 180gm or 200gm vinyl. Cover spines of these might be as thick as 12mm and weigh 700gms! As we said earlier – and as you can see in the picture above – your collection will likely contain a wide variety of different record packaging.
Your images show perfectly upright albums. Have you packed them tightly?
Not at all! Please read this Sleeve Note to see how we do this :-)
How much weight can each shelf take?
Chorus extending record shelves are designed to take 80 ‘standard’ albums (see above) which will weigh 20kgs in total. The slide mechanisms are designed and tested to take more than this but don’t load more than 20kgs because it makes the finger-flipping experience less enjoyable.
Will the shelf slides bend in use?
The slide bodies won’t bend in normal use. We use expensive, commercial-duty slides with bodies made of strong steel. The forces required to actually bend the slide body are so great and beyond normal use that a bent slide is excluded from our guarantee. Please tell any young children not to use the shelves as a climbing frame!
Note: At a full 20kgs of vinyl load, there will be a very small and normal deflection on slide extension caused by the required play between ball-bearing carriage and the slide body. If you look at the photos of extended shelves on this website, it’s barely noticeable. Deflection is not bending!