Brmorgan
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I've been in dire need of some kind of shelf system for organizing small parts like bolts and air/pipe fittings. Well, over the weekend I built something that should work for a while:
I went with a vertical-support system with dadoes to support smaller shelf pieces that will be tapped into place. The vertical support pieces are a mix of Lodgepole and Douglas Fir shorts that I'd been waiting to find a use for. Here I have the dadoes cut and everything laid out on the floor for a fit-up. Total dimensions are 3' high by 64-3/4" wide. To cut the dadoes I mounted my stack in the radial arm saw set for 1/2". I'd never tried the dado stack in the radial before, but I found it MUCH easier to use since I just used a sacrificial fence which showed me exactly where the cut was going to be. Easier than using a crosscut sled on the tablesaw, which incidentally I don't have anyway! It still took quite a while to cut them all - there's 100 total, which give me a total of 54 individual boxes.
Here I have the backer board on. It's just a couple scrap pieces of OSB I salvaged from the wood waste dump over the summer. I'd have liked to use all solid wood but this thing is heavy enough already! The individual boxes are about 6"X6" by 5" deep. The shelf pieces are the only pieces of wood I didn't mill myself - they're actually old 5/8" X 2.5" straight Douglas Fir and Hemlock trim I've been saving. They're full of small nail holes so aren't much good for bigger stuff, but I didn't want to just burn them. I planed them down to 1/2" and cut them to length, and used two pieces for each shelf.
It's now been hung on the wall and face strips tacked in front of the shelves with brad nails. The face strip pieces were planed down from small 3/4 X 3" Douglas Fir pieces that I'd managed to save out of some waste slabs. Nothing wasted here! The flat/rift sawn wood can have some really nice wavy grain too.
If you couldn't tell from the other picture, I used a double French cleat to hang the thing on the wall, rather than screwing it directly into the studs. This way if I need to move it, I can recruit a couple friends to help me move it without emptying everything out. It's also nice for heavy applications because the upper 45° angle of the wall-mounted cleat actually pushes a lot of the weight of the structure back into the wall rather than straight down on the screws that hold the cleat to the wall. One small oversight was that I should have made the top board wider so that it was still tight to the wall after being mounted - small stuff can roll down behind and sit on the cleats. But that can be fixed later.
At the sawmill we had entire walls like this in the workshops, with a bin for every fitting, nut, bolt, or washer known to man. I can't be THAT specific with my organizing, but it's so helpful to just be able to have one box for pipe reducers, one for T fittings, one for valves, one for barb fittings etc. even if I still have to hunt a bit in one box for a specific size. Before everything was just in one drawer and I had to pull half of it out to see the other half, and then sort through it. Same story with random nuts and bolts. Now I can at least separate everything by diameter and thread pitch, if not by length.
I went with a vertical-support system with dadoes to support smaller shelf pieces that will be tapped into place. The vertical support pieces are a mix of Lodgepole and Douglas Fir shorts that I'd been waiting to find a use for. Here I have the dadoes cut and everything laid out on the floor for a fit-up. Total dimensions are 3' high by 64-3/4" wide. To cut the dadoes I mounted my stack in the radial arm saw set for 1/2". I'd never tried the dado stack in the radial before, but I found it MUCH easier to use since I just used a sacrificial fence which showed me exactly where the cut was going to be. Easier than using a crosscut sled on the tablesaw, which incidentally I don't have anyway! It still took quite a while to cut them all - there's 100 total, which give me a total of 54 individual boxes.
Here I have the backer board on. It's just a couple scrap pieces of OSB I salvaged from the wood waste dump over the summer. I'd have liked to use all solid wood but this thing is heavy enough already! The individual boxes are about 6"X6" by 5" deep. The shelf pieces are the only pieces of wood I didn't mill myself - they're actually old 5/8" X 2.5" straight Douglas Fir and Hemlock trim I've been saving. They're full of small nail holes so aren't much good for bigger stuff, but I didn't want to just burn them. I planed them down to 1/2" and cut them to length, and used two pieces for each shelf.
It's now been hung on the wall and face strips tacked in front of the shelves with brad nails. The face strip pieces were planed down from small 3/4 X 3" Douglas Fir pieces that I'd managed to save out of some waste slabs. Nothing wasted here! The flat/rift sawn wood can have some really nice wavy grain too.
If you couldn't tell from the other picture, I used a double French cleat to hang the thing on the wall, rather than screwing it directly into the studs. This way if I need to move it, I can recruit a couple friends to help me move it without emptying everything out. It's also nice for heavy applications because the upper 45° angle of the wall-mounted cleat actually pushes a lot of the weight of the structure back into the wall rather than straight down on the screws that hold the cleat to the wall. One small oversight was that I should have made the top board wider so that it was still tight to the wall after being mounted - small stuff can roll down behind and sit on the cleats. But that can be fixed later.
At the sawmill we had entire walls like this in the workshops, with a bin for every fitting, nut, bolt, or washer known to man. I can't be THAT specific with my organizing, but it's so helpful to just be able to have one box for pipe reducers, one for T fittings, one for valves, one for barb fittings etc. even if I still have to hunt a bit in one box for a specific size. Before everything was just in one drawer and I had to pull half of it out to see the other half, and then sort through it. Same story with random nuts and bolts. Now I can at least separate everything by diameter and thread pitch, if not by length.
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