Organizing things in your home or workshop is a constant battle for some of us. Until we have access to a Tardis or bag of holding, maybe the next best thing is a sliding shelf system.
[HAXMAN] found a great set of sliding shelves online, but after recovering from sticker shock decided he could build something similar for much less. The frame for the shelving was built from 4×4 posts, some 2x4s, and strut channel track welded to steel 2x6s. Aluminum plates bolted to strut trolleys support the weight of the shelving units he built from plywood.
Everything was painted with a multi-material paint formulated for covering both wood and metal so everything has a uniform appearance. We love the bright shelving offset by the more classic black appearance of the rack. Just because its storage, doesn’t mean it has to look boring!
Looking for more clever storage solutions? You might like your to make your own shadow boards, favor Gridfinity, or just wonder what other readers do to organize their electronic odds and ends.
That looks great!
I stopped the video at 01:16 because due to “spectacular editing” you can’t even see what went wrong with the saw.
The video title screenshot was enough to stop me plsying it.
I do like the idea of these hanging closets. It resembles those big rolling cabinets that are sometimes used in (very big) paper archives. But those are rolling on rails in the ground, and the rails near the ceiling here keeps their insides clean and smooth rolling.
But indeed, the initial screenshot is all you need. I don’t like the color, but that’s personal, and there is no need to go personal here. There is also a relatively big waste of space on the top side. The closets can be easily extended on the top side to in between the rails. (And also closer to the bottom. And for efficient use, there could have been an extra closet, or they could been wider without the walking room getting too cramped.
Long (30+ years) ago, I made a different system, I bought 4 RAACO cabinets (those with the small drawers) I made a box with two doors on the front. Two raaco cabinets go against the backside of the box, the other two each hang on one of the doors. It’s pretty space efficient, and with the doors closed they are also are representable enough to put in my living room
It wasn’t the project that put me off but the video presentation: gaping mouths and back-to-front baseball caps are red flags for me, and to top it off the guy is swinging off the thing!
unfortunately the thumbnail is make or break for a video’s success. you are the minority that are not attracted by it
That’s youtube these days, you don’t get “selected by the algorithm” unless you have a punchy thumbnail ideally with a recognisable human face.
Some folks embrace it, some try to be more subtle, some probably love that bullshit.
You left out the best feature of those rolling archive cabinet things (do they have a proper name?), and that was the big wheel on the front to move everything.
I enjoy seeing this kind of thing, and it’s good if it solves some special problem, but as a rule I’m against storage schemes that put more than zero steps between me and the thing I need (even doors or drawers).
A thing sitting ready to use, on an open shelf, next to your work area, is twice as useful as a thing that you need to unpack, find or set up in any way. Ideally, if you think of something that might help what you’re doing right now, you should be able to grab it with one hand without consciously thinking about it.
I like old DVD/CD shelving, as the shelves are adjustable, and they’re too shallow for anything to be behind anything else, so it’s neater than you might imagine. Also pegboards, obvs.
Open shelving is great if you have the space, I think you’ve missed the part where most people don’t.
This build is based on archive cabinets, and as the name suggests for stuff you don’t use all that often. This dude seems to have left out a cabinet in his build, you don’t need that much open space.
A better option, and easier to build, is where the cabinets pull out, basically a chest of drawers flipped on its side. The cabinets are the same as here, and you gain more space as you don’t need the gap between the cabinets for access.
The sliding feature means unused space. Double thumbs down to this. Jane Leaves’s character on Seinfeld had a better idea: a series of hooks.
If the enclosures rotated you might have something but probably not.
You’re paying for one access space for multiple sets of shelves, instead of having N sets of access space for N shelves. You need *some* space or you’re not getting to anything.
Then again, why am I responding to an obvious troll?
You still need access space on the front too, otherwise you won’t get in between the shelves. So it’s not really saving much space.
My old company installed a similar commercially produced shelving system.
Previously, we had a 4 foot walkway with shelves on either side with a 4 foot walkway between each shelf. We kept the central corridor and put two of these units with an adjustable location 4 foot access space on each side.
These allowed us to expand archive storage from 16×7 shelves to 40×7 shelves. We increased storage 2.5X.
So these really do save quite a bit of space.
Yes, but if you’ve only got 4 shelves like he has, you’re not saving much if any space. If you’ve got 12… 100… now you’re saving space. Pretty as this is, it doesn’t scale down well.
Just remember to make sure whatever floor this is resting on can handle the weight as those shelves become fully loaded. There is a reason moving bookcase systems are installed only in reinforced concrete buildings.
A Radio Shack I visited decades ago remodeled and downsized their components & parts stock to a single wall, but it was remarkably packed: The pegboards/slotwall were on hinged panels like doors, spaced a few inches apart on the wall. You just pushed apart a couple of doors and you had a 90-degree corner of parts wall. Swing a door and you get another 90-degree wedge. All it took was a couple of hinges per “door”.
They managed to fit around 100 linear feet of “wall” display space onto a dozen doors taking up just 12 feet of wall space, or less than 50 square feet of floor space. Now, only one customer could browse at a time, though. Still, very compact, efficient, and cheap.
Yes! I remember these systems in Maplin in the Uk. Fantastic for small / flat items so the shelves can sit tight together.
I think some Ace Hardware stores still use the poster flipbook for things like tiny plumbing parts. They also seem to be fond of the layered pegboard system that slides laterally on rollers.
I am still not decided on whether I have too few storage space or too much stuff. Whoever tells me the latter (the truth): I don’t want to hear it.
Also, I envy US wood prices. In Europe, they used to be about double but due to the Russian invasion in Ukraïne, double that again (especially plywood)
hah hah! “strut trolleys”. i built a sliding door with unistrut and built my own trolleys from 608s, 5/16″ steel dowel, and some T-brackets. not sure if i would have used them if i knew they existed but duh of course they exist. you can just order them from a catalog
Look at all that wasted space up to the ceiling