Thursday 17 April 2014

Tool Rack MK 2

I've been operating with a tool rack made from some plywood mounted in the window, as suggested and used by Chris Schwarz, for about 12 months now (see my original one here). It has been a good experience so I've decided to "improve" it by making a new one.
What spurred me onto doing this was the chisel rack I'd added to the original tool rack.

Original Tool Rack
The chisel rack is mounted on the front LH side
Essentially it comprises a piece of 1/2" ply 2" wide x around 30" long. Into this I'd drilled a series of 7/8"
holes spaced on 1.1/8" centres. In practice when putting chisels in most went in but the handles touched on some of the bigger ones causing the chisels to lean over.
I set to work making another rack but this time positioned the 7/8" diameter holes on 1.1/2" centres.
I made the chisel rack a little longer than the original but this time it only had 20 holes. I left five holes at 3/4" diameter with two of them not having a slot. The slots were 8mm wide apart from two at 10mm wide to suit the large firmer chisels at the left hand end of the rack.

Here are a couple of pictures from my Sketchup design for the new tool rack:
Main assembly

View showing French cleat on the rear

The design of this is very simple as it is only two pieces of timber - in my case a softwood rear piece of 4 x 1 x about 55" long and the front made from a 6" wide x 1/2" thick x 48" long plywood. They are separated using 1/2" thick x 3/4" wide x 4" long spacers glued and nailed. I positioned the spacers about every 9" giving a series of slots that tools can be slid into.
I made some brackets out of scrap oak to screw the chisel rack onto the tool rack.

Tool rack in position fully loaded
The whole assembly has French cleats on the back and simply slots onto the mating French cleats that I already have on the wall. For extra security I screwed the tool rack into the wall too.

This tool rack makes great use of the wasted space taken by the window and still lets the vast majority of light through so makes it a win all around.

Auxiliary rack with some day to day
essentials.


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