Diablo: Building a Wood Storage Rack

I have a problem and I believe you can tell what it is. I've got my slab stored back here and this is a train wreck. The way that they're store basically everything is just leaning against the wall and wouldn't you know it, every time I need a slab it's the one that's back there and I have to move everything that's in front of it so we're gonna solve this problem. I'm gonna build a wood storage rack, more specifically a metal wood storage rack. I wanna do it in metal because it's gonna do a great job of supporting all of this really heavy stuff and the picture in my head, I think this will work is for the slabs to go in this way like library books on a shelf.

So that they're leaning against the storage rack instead of leaning against the back wall that'll make them way more accessible. So let me um hatch a few ideas and then I'll show you those ideas and we'll get cotton on some metal and see if I can fix this problem. I did a little noodling on this and here's what I've come up with. What I wanna do is. Build this So looking up here, that's the beam that's currently over my head looking over here.

That's the closet that's right here and then of course my exit door is there so one of the things I like about the idea of making this out of metal, not wood, is that those metal components can be smaller than wooden components would have to be so I can fit a lot more storage in a given amount of space. What I wanna do. I use angle iron 2 by 2 angle iron that's gonna be all of these uprights. And then also the base unit, the base unit and the head unit up here are identical. That's gonna be completely made.

Out of angle iron. You can see there the direction that I'm going. Then the other thing I want is to make sure that this is very, very stable. There's gonna be a lot of weight in here so I'm gonna use just flat stock. To make these diagonal braces and there are a few things are gonna happen there they're gonna get bolted in at the top and at the bottom and then I'm also gonna bolt in the center where those X's meet.

Where the Xs meet, I'm also gonna do a horizontal that's gonna be be a piece of one by one tubing and what I like about that is when the slabs are in there, those things are heavy and they're leaning. Instead of leaning against that flat stack that's bracing the end they're gonna lean against that one by one tubing so that's gonna give them a lot more support and the bolt that goes through the bracing will also go into the tubing so that's gonna make it very, very strong additional diagonal bracing here on the back and then these guys. Are so that those verticals are so that when everything is in there it's not all leaning all to the right or leaning all to the left it gives me an additional divider in the middle so I don't end up with hundreds of pounds of slab weight all in one direction. I'm up against the same problem then this is the slab I want and there's a bunch of weight leaning against it. I gotta move a lot of stuff so those verticals are gonna give me another wall basically in the center of this to make it a little bit easier to manipulate everything.

So I like the design. What that means is I have a bunch of metal to cut, and I'm gonna show you how I'm gonna cut that. It's crazy cool. I'm gonna be using a standard cirk saw to do all of this cutting. You're gonna really like these next couple steps here.

Here's what's gonna make metalwork work. I'm gonna use a bunch of Diablo products here, one of which is the steel demon saw blade. So in my standard irk saw I'm about to cut through a bunch of angle iron and tube steel and flat stack using this blade. It's gonna work great. Then when we put the whole thing together.

We're gonna drill a bunch of holes that's gonna happen with the metal demon drill bits. What I really like about these is with their split point, I don't have to pre-drill with a little bit and then step up to the bigger one. I can go straight to my finish size. They work really, really well. We have a bunch of areas that we're gonna have to clean up the cuts that we made, do some corner rounding, and I'll be using a flat disc in my angle grinder also from Diablo to make that happen.

Here's where we're at. I know that my verticals. are 9 ft long. We're gonna measure and mark. Honestly, once I get to cotton, don't blink or you'll miss it.

The, uh, the steel demon blades handle this metal very, very, very well. And a whole bunch more of that. Here's what's happening now. I cut all my parts and remember from the drawing I'm gonna end up with a big rectangular base these pieces, the long ones. are going to tuck under.

The short ones Like this So what I'm doing here with that flap disc is I'm knocking some of that corner off of these, the reason being the inside corner on angle iron is never a crisp 90 degree corner that's gonna allow these pieces to tuck in. A little bit further when they come under the short pieces so we can have a couple things going on here uh the cut quality off of the saw blade is amazing if there are any of these edges you wanna clean up just to kind of deb the flap disc is great for that and or working on these corners to put just a little bit of a round over on there so I get a little bit better make between the parts. Assembly has begun. Bunch of things here. One, I'm gonna drill a lot, a lot, a lot of holes in the same pattern, so I took the time to make a couple of templates.

This is gonna define my whole locations on the corners and then this one is gonna define my hole locations out here in the middle where it's more open. I'm using a metal demon bit for this, and I mentioned earlier, one of the things that's great about this is I don't have to pre-drill with a smaller size. I can go directly to the diameter that I need. You're gonna see in a second it's gonna punch right through the steel and of course metal demon bits, but you can also use these on wood, plastic, and other media. So next thing I'm ready to do.

I put this stretcher in. And when this fits, when this goes in. Remember that I took the time to use the flap disk to ease those corners and when you look right here at this corner where the short and the long come together you can see there the benefit of doing that it allows that piece to better tuck under this piece so that flap disc worked really, really, really well for that. So what I need to do is mark out now. My whole locations.

And then we're ready to drill. Now similar to the longs fitting under the shorts, what's about to happen is that on these corners we're gonna put verticals here. And again, I've got a sharp outside corner that's about to go into a rounded inside corner, so let's jump back. To the flap disc. And take care of those I would say.

This is pretty Robust and it's not gonna have any problems supporting those live edge slabs that I want to store on this. We are getting pretty close to the point where we can keep going with assembly and get the verticals on this, and it's gonna start looking like a wood storage rack very, very soon. It's very fun to see the verticals hit the horizontals at the top and the bottom, so same protocol. Overlapping, marking with my template, drilling holes. And now quite a bit of 2nd verse, same as the 1st.

I got a lot of bolts to put in. And the diagonal bracing, the easiest way to get the angle figured out is to put the bracing on the rack and then get it established corner to corner and then just trace the rack onto the bracing. So I've got lines like this on each end. It's another cut we can make with the steel demon blade. And I'll get that drilled and bolted on while I'm on the back here.

It's currently backside up and then flip this over a couple more uprights to put on some more diagonal bracing. It's really coming together nice. Down to about the last step here, which is this cross piece I mentioned this earlier, this is gonna go in here so that when uh lumber is in this rack, it's leaning against something robust, not against just my diagonal bracing. Things are a little bit different here. In this case I'm not gonna drill through.

I'm gonna drill a hole. And then I'm gonna put an insert into it and that insert can receive the bolt. This is a cool technology to know about with tube steel like this if we bolt all the way through and you're really tighten the heck out of that bolt, it's possibly it could collapse the tube steel so this gets away from that. I've gone to a larger drill bit and I really again want to point out it's cool with these split point bits that even though I'm at a bigger diameter than I was using before, we can go right to the size I need. I don't have to do a pre-drill.

That makes that piece ready to install. That's it. The rack is built. What I'm gonna do is get an extra pair of hands in here, tip this baby up, move all that wood out, get the rack in and load it up. I can't wait to see it in that corner.

Boy, is that cool. What a better use of space it is. And there's actually, uh, what a surprise, material in there that I didn't know I owned. The only thing that really made this possible for me was being able to do all the cutting with that steel demon blade, and I did a lot, a lot, a lot of cutting with that blade and it's still performing great and then of course all the holes I drilled with the metal demon drill bits and using the flap sander flap disc in order to clean up those sawn edges. Great project thanks to those Diablo tools for helping me pull it off.

Hopefully you can get some ideas from this for your own shot. I love it.