Which look pretty cool if I say so myself. Made from threaded rods, wood and some nuts, these are adjustable, sturdy, relatively easy to make, and cheap (unless you want to buy planks of wood made from the sacred remains of the elder tree, found only in the Lost City Of The Bold).
This will be a semi-DIY guide, so strap on your hard hats, don your protective eyewear and lets get dusty. There will be some technical jargon but I’ll do my best to explain along the way.
What You’ll Need.
The tools you might want to use;
Measuring tape.
Pencil.
Straight edge (IE a ruler or T-Square)
A Drill, with bits (For the rods to go through the wood)
Saw (For the wood. I used a couple of hand saws. You can use an electric one).
Hacksaw (For the steel rods. Maybe some oil too)
Clamps. (I used straps).
Sandpaper
Spanner (To nip up the nuts) (<–That’s a nice sentence isn’t it?)
The hardware you might want to buy;
Threaded rod (I used 1 meter long M10 size) = 2 * Pack of 5 M10 1m £25.38
Nuts (Same size as your rods, M10 in my case) = 1 * Pack of 50 M10 £8.95
Flat washers (M10 in my case) = 1 * Pack of 50 M10 £3.19
Planks of wood = 3 * 170mm x 20mm (or as you need it) £53.15
Again, buy some nice cheap pine or MDF, or reuse some pallet wood and the cost will be minimal.
MATHS!
So for these shelves on the boat, they had to occupy a 170cm long space, with around 20cm depth. This gave me the rough measurements to look for when buying the wood (Which was a fancy African Sapele from a timber merchants; admittedly the most expensive part of the project but was bought for its quality). I chose 2 rows of 4 rods to keep them upright and sturdy. Perhaps this was overkill but they’re pretty sturdy! From the floor to the gunnel (the space halfway up the wall) measured 92cm so I knew I needed to order rods around 1 meter long. I knew that I wanted three shelves. Each shelf would have 8 holes in it for the rods. And I knew I needed a nut and a washer on each side of the shelf hole. So 8*2 = 16 (for each shelf) & 16*3 = 48 (for the three shelves). Which is why i ordered a pack of 50 nuts and 50 washers.
Here’s an image of my plan I drew up before I began:
Just a little joke…
How To Do It.
Measure twice, cut once.
Firstly you need to measure your space where the shelves will go. Measure the width of the space to find out how long the wood needs to be. Measure the depth of the space to find out how wide the wood needs to be. Measure the height of the space to figure out how many shelves you want, then how many planks of wood you need to make them. The height also gives you how long the rods need to be. (If you can’t find rods the length you need, you can buy rod couplers to stick them together).
Do all of these measurements again, just to check.
Done that, ordered the stuff.
Get the wood and measure from one edge, out to the length the shelves need to be. Make a mark at the top and the bottom, then draw a line between the two with your straight edge. Cut the wood to size with your saw. Sand the edge afterwards to make it presentable. Do this with all of your planks!
My professional workspace. The black marks are how you might measure and draw on your wood.
Sanding the edge to make it half-decent.
Rods.
Measure again how tall the rods need to be and make a mark on the rod. You’ll need a hacksaw with a decent blade to cut through the metal. It’s going to take a bit of effort and elbow grease (and actually, some oil to help lubrication) but stick at it and you will cut through. As you’ll see, I like to take shortcuts so had mine zip-tied together for “efficiency”.
Norris optional.
Clean the dirty ends with a rag, and if you need to, lightly thread a nut onto the end. This will help the thread at the end to run smooth and clean – a necessity for later on.
Threading a nut on from the cut end will help to even the threads out a bit after sawing. Also, it gives you a great excuse to take a luscious photo of shiny steel hardware on seasoned hardwood.
One Drillium Dollars.
Alright next up we’re gonna make some holes, and holes in wood are made with drills. Measure the points on your top plank where you would like your rods to go through. You might want them evenly spaced, or you might want to do some funky design business with asymmetrical rods scattered about. That’s cool; you do you. Just make sure you’ve got two at each end. Make some pencil marks where the holes will go.
You can just about see my marks at the top and bottom of the shelf. I drew a line with my straight edge to check alignment.
We’ve next got to stack all the wooden shelves so that the edges line up. Then clamp them together so they won’t move during drilling. The top plank with the marks on is going to be our guide, and we’re going to try to drill through all of the shelves at once so that we know our holes will be equal. I used a 10mm drill bit but in hindsight, an 11mm or 12mm drill bit would have saved a little time down the road.
“Clamped” together, with edges lined up.
Starting to drill. That’s a 10mm drill bit, as I have M10 (10mm) rod. There will be a guide on how to make those straps.
Nice.
Holes drilled.
Unclamp your shelves, then if you’ve used say a 10mm bit for 10mm rods, then one by one just whizz the drill around the edges of the holes to make them a little larger in diameter. This is so that the threaded rods can slide into their holes easier and TRUST ME, having that extra space in the holes is going to make assembly far easier.
Assembly.
Gather everything together now;
Shelf planks cut to size with holes drilled out
Threaded rod, cut to length, cleaned and tidied
Nuts
Washers
Ready!
To start, each of the rods will need a nut, then a washer as a base. The washer lies against the shelf. We’ll slide the rods onto the designated bottom shelf, then put on top a washer and a final nut, so it looks like this;
/nut\ -washer- ——–shelf——– -washer- \nut/
Fair warning here: it takes ages to thread each nut down the rods.
Your first shelf.
After shelf one is loosely set in place, thread another nut down each rod to a rough position number 2, slide a washer to the nut, then jiggle the next shelf into position. This is where you will be glad you made your holes a larger diameter than the rod! Another washer on top, then a nut down into each position.
Ta-daaaaaaaa! Two shelves
Rinse and repeat for as many shelves as you have until they are all roughly in position.
Finishing Touches.
To just add that level of frustrating perfectionism to our final product, I suggest using a tape measure to make distances between shelves nice and equal. You can also use a spirit level to check your work if you live somewhere with regular gravity (A boat does not experience traditional “levelling” techniques…because of the water.)
Comparing one section to another. Do this by measuring from the bottom edge of one shelf to the top edge of the next. Check at each rod. Check that your shoes fit in the space and get enough sunlight to grow into big, fruit-bearing shoe trees.
On a serious note, this is going to ensure that your shelves look flat and well made, and give you a sense of pride in a job well done.
If you find that one part of the shelf is slightly higher or lower than another, then simply turn the nuts in the direction you need it to level out at.
It’s nice to have made the shelve spaces different sizes to accommodate things custom to your area. I later changed the top shelf to give more space to be able to fit a bluetooth speakjust below the gunnel. It meant that I had to reposition the fire extinguisher to the side but this was no big deal.
A *smidge* more room.
And that’s that.
Shelves.
You can get mega magical if you like and really sand them down to a super smooth finish, then cover the shelves in all manner of stains, polishes, waxes, varnishes and the like (Which you actually may want to do if you’ve used something like pine). You could add feet to the bottom of the rods, and cap the tops off some how.
But these work.
Till next time, respect yo-shelfs.
Drills!
-Frank
If you measured a nugget here today, that would rule(r). Wooden it be drill-iant to share that washer-mbody in your life? I would really like that. Pencil it in. I’d like more if I Saw how it went!
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