I look on places like Freecycle for old wooden furniture and use the wood from that. I find solid wood stronger than MDF and other man made boards (except good quality ply, which can be expensive).

I use the same kind of brackets as John, and use wood shelves. This system has served me well for decades.

Thor

Noel,

Not sure where you are in the country, but I have three sets of pressed steel shelving about 1.2m/4' tall, with 4 × 250mm by 1000mm shelves which has been replaced with heavier racking (from a shop fitter who had salvaged them when refitting a McDonald's of all places) and is tucked away under my workbench.

Can find some photos if you might be interested.

Edited By Jelly on 18/05/2023 14:03:57

Me too, except as a variant, I've found plastic guttering useful for holding stock rather than only fitting plain wooden shelves. Bit more fuss fixing the guttering in place, but it provides 2 or 3 shelves in one, in which I can separate longish lengths of Aluminium, Brass and Steel.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 18/05/2023 14:26:28

Make sure that the shelves and brackets are sturdy.

You will find that you put a lot of weight on them without realising just how much.

Mine were the bargeboarding from a neighbour's house. The ordinary shelf brackets are spaced at 12" intervals, and need to be given the piles of stuff placed above them.

Howard

I have used this type of shelf system, both in the workshop and indoors.

The version I used originally and that I prefer has the brand name 'Spur'. In early days this was made by an offshoot of Savage & Parsons Ltd.' known initially to me as manufacturers of transformers. The S & P in 'Spur' is easy to link to Savage & Parsons. I believe that, nowadays, the Spur operation is independent.

This shelving system is immensly strong and will support lots of books indoors and quite heavy tooling items in the workshop. Of course, the weight falls first on the shelves so the material used there needs to be chosen with care. The spacing between the uprights also needs to be chosen with care.

I have also encountered a very similar loking system, I think its brand name was/is 'module' or 'locus' or some such name. I have both and, in my opinion, the brackets from one brand do not fit well into the uprights of the other!

Best regards,

Swarf, Mostly!

My keyboard is having a bad day!!

For 'loking', please read 'looking'.

Best regards,

Swarf, Mostly!

I 'bulk-bought' an apparently identical set of the shelving linked to from Screwfix.

The shelves are thin, but supported across the middle so the MDF actually supports two 450mm squares.

The units are almost purposely designed to induce buyer remorse, thin, 'wangy', and lacking any kind of stiffness until fully assembled and with the shelves in. If you can screw em to a wall so much the better..

They look & feel pretty dreadful, but on the other hand you get a lot of shelving for relatively little money – 175kg per shelf is pretty adequate (even if somewhat hard to believe)..

Diogenes

175 kg per shelf stops being hard to believe the moment you consider the (non) engineering of the common smartly faced chipboard bookshelf sets from Ikea et al. Almost a yard of books supported on 4 wimpy little pins pushed into the uprights. Books by the yard are heavy, really heavy. I'd be scared to try and calculate the loadings involved. Far as I can see the support engagement is about 6 mm long by 4 mm wide per pin, assuming a little bit of load flow from the flat board around the pin. Doing the maths seems to be tempting fate that if I did figure out thing the shelves would realise they actually aren't strong enough and collapse. Something over 9 m length by 2 m high of fully loaded bookshelf its a lot to re-home!

Kit built furniture always seems vastly under-engineered for the job and I hate the way everything flops about until that last part slots in making it a stiff structure. But the Argos bed in teh spare room did get some extra brackets.

I guess the old adage that, for smaller projects up to "needs a few people" size the old adage that if its "stiff enough its strong enough". Peering under a modern car is a (worrying) education into how much load can be passed through how little material if you are clever about it.

Clive

Dear S.O.D., any chance of a piccie or description of how you fix the guttering in place. Profile cut adjuncts to the top of the brackets, maybe?

I ask, because I am going to embark on the same project soon.

Cheers, Colin