Shelving From Recycled Materials

I'm always trying to find ways to save money, whether I'm at work or at home. This project literally cost my company $8.67. I work in a warehouse area and we tend to have longer and odd shaped pieces that don't really fit into any particular style of shelving. These items in particular are longer and skinnier, so some simple cantilever shelving would work just fine. The problem is though, my job didn't want to spend any money on shelving, so to help myself and the company i needed a solution to both problems. Here is what i came up with.

I was able to find some older Satellite dish mounts with their hardware. Most older dishes get removed and its gets tossed away, or when a new one comes in it has its own hardware. I gathered a few of these, and in the picture it shows just a singular bracket with pole. Now if you don't have the screw and nut, they would be easy to come by at any hardware store. They're 1/4 -20 anchor bolts that are 3" long. If you have to buy the nuts as well, i would suggest a nylok, or something that has an added securing feature, just because of vibrations.

I used a torpedo level to verify that each bracket was level once i mounted one side of each bracket. I had a line to go off of, but you might want a tape measure to use for reference so you can get the brackets relatively close to the same height. I also doubled up the washers for these screw heads and if you were going to use some heavier materials, you might want to consider using a heavier duty screw. For me, the coarse exterior screws would just fine.

When building your brackets make sure to use the curved side towards the holder, and to make sure the anchor bolts square corners match up with the square hole. Once the bolts are all the through, pull it to the side making the pole stand perpendicular to the bracket and tighten down the nuts onto the bolts. Once you've completed your desired amount of brackets. Mount them to the wall.

Like i mentioned before i added extra washers to the screws to help beef up the holding tension, but i also had some heavier items so i added a couple extra screws just to ensure they would hold if 1 screw failed. Now for you folks that enjoy wood working or metal fabrication, this would also lead to a good idea on some storage shelving for your extra materials. The brackets themselves hold a fair amount of weight, but the fail point is really how heavy duty of a screw/ bolt used in mounting them. I hope you enjoy this project and it gets you thinking about how to improve your areas either at work or at home without spending a whole lot of money. Please leave a comment if you've got any questions or would like me to add anything.