BOLTLESS WITH BOLTS
The Dream Workshop supplement (CM Nov 2022) brings back memories of the “click together shelving”. I bought four such racks a few years ago – you know, the sort that are boldly promoted as “great” because they are “boltless”.
Well, I don’t know about anyone else who has assembled those “boltless” racks, but, to me, to assemble them on your own, you need “3+” arms and a lot of patience as the process is very much “two steps forward, then one step back”. Once you get one end of a frame bar slotted in, you generally then find that the other end has become dislodged – and then impossible to refit because the soft steel “lugs” in one bar have deformed and won’t fit the slots in the mating one!
However, I finally got all four racks assembled and in place, but, later, I wanted to move them around the garage – so how did I then ensure that they didn’t damned well fall apart in the process? Thus I came up with, and then implemented, a workable solution – Ifitted BOLTS and NUTS (so they’re not “boltless” any more)!”
I drilled 3.5mm pilot, and then 6.5mm clearance, holes right through the vertical and horizontal bars at the junction points, and bolted them together with M6 x 12mm roofing bolts and serrated-flange nuts, and the picture show what the “finished job” looks like.
The racks, at least when fairly empty, are now pretty easy to “shove around” without falling over/apart, and makes future re-arrangements much easier – on reflection, I should have done the same thing when I first assembled them as the job would have been much less time-consuming, sweaty and frustrating (during very hot summer days in a hot garage)!
Hope this concept might help anyone else planning to get that sort of racking and save them
