French cleats

 I have been making a few holders for various tools, time to hang them up on the walls.

But how?  There are various ways to go about it.  In the past 16 years or so, I have been using perf board with custom wooden holders. But this time I want something I can easily remove the holders yet be very strong.  Hence French cleats.

Nothing new, been using them to hang all my tills on the walls, but this time I will be using a row of evenly spaced cleats, in a bid to maximized wall spaces and give me enough adjustability.

After some experimentation, settled on a 2 inch spacing as such.

Each wall cleats would be 2 inches wide, spaced 2 inches apart. 

the top most part is simply squared, not cut at an angle like the cleats. 

 That is to provide both support and lockability for the fixtures.

Of courses all these cleats parts required a 45 degrees rip cut, definitively NOT something I would entertained doing by hand.  Easy job for a table saw, but my Unisaw remains power less, need to bring in 220V in garage.  Normally I would just make a run to the hobby shop and ran them thru, but, in this Omicron wave, travels are restricted, so stay home and come up with a plan D.

The other, little thing was, where is my wood coming from to make these, do I have any suitable?  Yes and No, but nothing more than a few quick passes in the planer would suffice, to make some out of some rough strapping's boards.  Of course in my tight garage that required some re shuffling of equipment sharing footprint inside.  All of which required the garage door to be open, so needed some good weather.

Equipment shuffled, ready for the weather

All that to say, that today, it went up to 11C inside my garage with the door opened most of the day.  I got her done.

Completed with planer, re shuffled equipment.

Snow blower and emergency generator must remain accessible by door.

Yes, I got a new blower this year, well 2021 :-)

Here is a mostly pictorial record of how it went.

This is the space under the Boring till.

I want to reorganize it better and recycled those holders

This is part of the space under the window.

The scraper holder, bench cookies and my daily work board 

will also migrate to French Cleats.  

The boring bits till will be redone later

All these holders will be recycled to French cleats.

There are all currently set up for peg board.

Earlier this month, I made a quick holder for my hammers, 

modeled loosely on the one I used for my mallets.

I cut the parts while doing a supervisor shift at the wood shop.

The parts are not assembled yet

Back at home I glued and screwed the parts together.

I only used two of my three support brackets.

Now for the wall cleats .

 I want my finished cleats to be 2 inches wide, I also want to protect the fragile knife edge by cutting it back about 1/8 of an inch.

So I am ripping them at 45 degrees at 2-1/8 inch wide, then cut back to 2 inch by cutting off a part of the lip.

Since I am currently unable to used the Unisaw, 

I used the small bench top saw that came with Jean ;-)

That wide cleat I used to check my angle was a left over from hanging my tills previously

Ran into issues with my feather boards.

The T bolt on the red one were not wide enough to capture the table saw miter gauge slot.

My yellow magnetic one did not work, table is cast aluminum, not iron. 

Had to resort to my old standby's, wooden ones with a clamp

My initial production.  I rejected two because of blown out knots and made new ones.

They were all cut at 2-1/8 inches wide, both wall and fixtures ones.

I later recut the fixtures one to 1-7/8 inches and the wall ones at 2 inches.

ending up with a flat at the end of the thin lip.

Armed with a few pieces and a some cardboard,

 mock up how the fixture will land on my proposed

spacing layout of 2 inches.

That set up give me a 4 inch adjustment from rows to rows.

Also used this mock up to figured out minimum width 

of back board required to secured narrow holders.

I got help from Rudy with this project.

You give me a treat and I will not take off with one of your parts :-)

 

And that is where I stand now.  I have confirmed my settings and am almost ready to install them, but first sanding and...

Bob, who is keeping busy at home