If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. Now that I have some property and the opportunity to actually build things that I don’t have to take down, I can start doing things like building shelving that I expect to last the rest of my life (so a design lifespan of about 65 years - and that’s a bit optimistic given my genes).
(Comments from Blogger)
2017-10-22 by Richard
I built shelves almost the same for my root cellar. I used 3/4 plywood with 2" wide strips glued and screwed the the shelves. It holds a lot of canning jars which can add up quickly in weight. I had plastic shelves like you had but in a year they started to droop from the weight of the full canning jars. I needed as much room as i could get out of it so the strips worked better than 2X4’s. I can stand on these shelves and much more weight than me is on them. Nice work. Over building seems a waste to some but things i build and you last and don’t need reinforcing later.
Thanks for sharing your projects. I’m 70 now and everything i build 40 years ago still work and haven’t fallen down including my house.
2017-10-22 by Russell Graves
Canning jars are certainly dense when full! I was standing on these while working on them and they didn’t budge, so I’m pretty comfortable with loading them up. Glad to hear yours held up 40+ years - I’d like to be able to say the same thing about these in a few decades.
2017-10-26 by Unknown
I’m SO glad you have this blog with detailed descriptions. In this age of FB, everything is getting slurped into the today-only-thumb-scrolled-ether. Looking at TuffSheds and similar options now for back yard project!
2017-10-26 by Russell Graves
Thanks - it’s certainly a lot more work on my end than “Take a few pictures, toss them in an imgur album, write a sentence about each one and toss it on the Social Medias for the views.” I hate that style of post, and I hate video for things that should be text and photos - a lot of the teardowns and such I do are far better documented than a video, and I’m not subject to the “initial impressions were wrong” issue that some of the teardown videos suffer with. Now, certainly, they’re a lot more popular than my blog is… and I admit some jealousy there, but I don’t feel I can do what I want to do properly with the constraints of video. Also, I’m not particularly good at video editing.
I’ve also discovered that quite a few of my hobbies (increasingly related to older machinery and equipment) are not well documented on the internet at all. I strive to solve that problem, in my own way, by documenting the process. It certainly adds time to my work, but at least the blog pays for beer!