Until today I had a cluster of Bessey parallel clamps jammed together on the floor in my shop:
1 mess on the floor.jpg
I've been dreaming of getting them up on a wall somewhere, but I have very limited wall space in the shop. It's a working garage with virtually every inch of the wall taken up by something (at least I can say that about 8 feet of that is a massive French cleat wall with a hundred tools on it, but that wouldn't fit the clamps).
Lee Valley sells an elegant little rack:
1.1 lee-valley-clamp-rack-f-0194.jpg
The shelves are held onto the backer board with cross dowels and bolts. It's a great idea, but you can only store one set of clamps on a stud. That wasn't going to work in my cramped space. Then I was inspired by some of the marketing copy for Lee Valley's rack:
"This is the kind of space-saving shop fixture that every woodworker could make; our kit saves you the trouble."
That's all I needed. I decided to use their plywood shelf idea and put several shelf pairs on one backer board, each board bolted between two studs. In all I opted for five shelf pairs. Here's the build...
The stack of shelves:
2 shelf stack.jpg
I used 1/4" x 2-1/2" bolts and 5/8" long dowels. To fit the cross dowels you need to drill into the back of the shelf for the bolt and through the shelf face for the dowel.
3 cross dowel.jpg 4 drill press setup.jpg 5 1:4%22 holes.jpg
Note: If I had this to do over, I'd use 2" bolts instead of 2-1/2". I'd have a simpler drill press procedure. I don't think 1/1/2" would be long enough.
That's all the photos I'm allowed for now. I'll continue on the next post.
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