More Shelving in the Shop

 

George Carlin said it best when he declared, "What is a house, really, but a place to keep our shit? If we didn't have so much shit, we could just walk around all the time."

Well, I do have a fair amount of shit, so I like making efficient use of what space I have. There is one area of wasted space in my shop that I've had my eye on for some time, and that's over my
workbench. I have several oversize boxes with crap I'm seldom into, such as one that's full of clean, old towels and rags. There are a few boxes with things for the motorhome too, and things for the Harley that will probably never get used. I decided to finally get with it and build a shelf to get all this crap off the shop floor.

Instead of the variety I usually make (just welded steel angle and plywood) I opted for something that was more heavy duty without being any more bulky. To hold decent weight it needed to be tied in with the ceiling and the wall both. When there are shelves over your head you sure don't want them to be rickety, right? I decided to use Superstrut (or Unistrut) for the uprights. That stuff offers lots of strength and ease of use in a pretty small package. I figured they'd be easiest to use with my design idea. I also picked up ready-made L-brackets for the ends too.

I started off by drilling a piece of angle iron and anchoring it to the ceiling with lag bolts. This is where a stud finder comes in handy!

I figured out about where I wanted the wall cleat to be, and made use of the stud finder again, bolting the cleat up--also with lag bolts of course:

 

I hung the uprights loosely so I could measure the wall cleat for cutout locations. After taking the cleat back off the wall and carving my 2x4 notches out of it, I put it back up and started looking at hole usage in the uprights. It's convenient having slots the whole length to use as needed! I opted to leave excess on the uprights and the bolts going down through the 2x4 horizontals in case I want to attach anything in the future.

It's time to get those horizontals drilled and cut so I could get things bolted together. Lots of measuring, removing, remeasuring... I drilled the horizontals with a counterbore so the carriage bolt heads wouldn't interfere with the plywood top when I put it over them.

I was happy to find the horizontals to be already level with the bracket bolts resting on the bottom of the slot openings. Easy-peasy.

Here you can see why I didn't need a horizontal on the left end. I used a wall cleat instead for less interference:

Ready for plywood!

It's funny how fast shelves fill up when you build them...