Project Information
My garage is cinder-block construction, and I didn't want to mess around with masonry screws, so I made a free-standing lumber rack to hold everything which was previously sitting in piles on the floor and in the basement. My parents were visiting for Memorial Day this weekend and so my dad and I knocked this thing together in about 3 hours all told, including moving the lumber onto it.
It's a pretty simple construction: 2×4s cut to 18-inch lengths, at 5° angles on both ends to make parallelograms, sandwiched between 1×4s on each end, again cut to 5° parallelograms, but only on the very ends. One of the 1×4s is cut at the top so as to provide about 4 inches of contact at the top. The horizontal shelves are held in place by drywall screws to keep their place while its being assembled, but once it was up two machine screws locked them in and provided the kind of strength normal screws cant give. There's space in the middle for sheet goods, and I used the protruding end of one of the support 2×4s to store some bar clamps.
The benefit of this design was that you don't have to worry about making 4 of one direction, then 4 of the other- each piece is identical, so when you're assembling it if you find you have two pieces that look the same, flipping one upside-down sorts it out and provides two opposing pieces.
It takes up more floor space than a normal wall mounted rack, but has twice the storage space. It is held together by 4 8-foot 2×4s. Definitely takes two people to put together, three would have been better. Once we had the 3 parallel 2×4s in place (2 on the bottom, one through the top) it was still pretty wobbly. Then we added the cross brace and it got locked down rock solid. I was literally trying to rock it as hard as I could and it wouldn't budge an inch, it was like it was part of the floor.
It's a pretty simple construction: 2×4s cut to 18-inch lengths, at 5° angles on both ends to make parallelograms, sandwiched between 1×4s on each end, again cut to 5° parallelograms, but only on the very ends. One of the 1×4s is cut at the top so as to provide about 4 inches of contact at the top. The horizontal shelves are held in place by drywall screws to keep their place while its being assembled, but once it was up two machine screws locked them in and provided the kind of strength normal screws cant give. There's space in the middle for sheet goods, and I used the protruding end of one of the support 2×4s to store some bar clamps.
The benefit of this design was that you don't have to worry about making 4 of one direction, then 4 of the other- each piece is identical, so when you're assembling it if you find you have two pieces that look the same, flipping one upside-down sorts it out and provides two opposing pieces.
It takes up more floor space than a normal wall mounted rack, but has twice the storage space. It is held together by 4 8-foot 2×4s. Definitely takes two people to put together, three would have been better. Once we had the 3 parallel 2×4s in place (2 on the bottom, one through the top) it was still pretty wobbly. Then we added the cross brace and it got locked down rock solid. I was literally trying to rock it as hard as I could and it wouldn't budge an inch, it was like it was part of the floor.