Super Deep Shelf for Storing Cardboards

My wife needed a better place to store her cake cardboards and macaroon boxes, they were stored in the garage which was mostly unreachable and hard to keep clean.

So we decided building this shelf out of two racks that would nicely fit the depth of her biggest cardboard (75 cm / 30" deep).

Each rack is made of 3 layers of Birch plywood, the layers are glued together and trimmed flush with a router.

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16mm Birch Plywood (5/8”)

4x Long Anchor bolts (2 sleeves each)

Jigsaw

Clamps

Double sided tape

Wood glue

Router with a flush trim bit

Drill and wood drill bits - Spade and regular

Sandpaper

Optional for the supportive planks:

Miter saw

Wood planks

Countersink drill bit

Wood screws

To start, I measured one of her biggest cardboards so that I'll know what I have to deal with here. Based on the measurements I decided to go with a 75 cm (30 inch) deep rack, with a total of 2 racks.

I then moved on to cutting my plywood to manageable size pieces, then drew and cut a template from it.

Once the template was ready, I traced it on the plywood and cut additional 5 pieces from that template.

Since I wanted to go with two racks, I had to get two identical templates before the gluing step, so I grabbed my template and one of the pieces, held them tight together with a double sided tape, making sure the top edge was flush, and then trimmed that piece flush with a router and a flush trim router bit.

At this point I realized my flush trim bit wasn't long enough so I had to keep adjusting the height, to make life a bit easier I readjusted 2 plunge pre-sets on my router. When the two templates were flush, I separated them and removed the double sided tape.

Now that I had 2 templates, I was ready to start gluing up additional pieces to form my racks. Each rack is composed of 3 layers of 16mm (5/8”) birch plywood. I started by gluing the second layer, held the layers tightly with all the clamps I could find (you never have enough clamps do ya...) and gave it a few hours to dry.

After the glue dried, I removed the clamps and started trimming the pieces flush the same way I trimmed the 2 templates.

Once that's done I repeated the same steps for the third layer of plywood.

This was by far the part I feared the most, after spending so much time trimming and gluing everything together I was worried that the plywood would just tear out or explode in my face because of how violent the spade bit can be.

I started by drilling two guiding holes, and then drilled again with a bit that is the same width as the anchor bolt without the sleeve is. I then switched to the spade bit and drilled deep enough so that the bolt would stick out the back and into the concrete wall at least the length of 1 sleeve.

I placed the screws in the holes, attached the sleeves and nuts and proceeded to drilling holes on the wall.

Once the racks were ready it was time to start planning and measuring where I'm going to mount the racks to the wall. I took some measurements, made sure the racks would be on the same height and 90 degrees to the floor.

I drilled 4 holes in the concrete wall deep enough to fit the entire sleeve of the anchor bolt, placed the racks with the screws and started screwing the bolts so that the nut would pull into the sleeve and hold the racks tight against the wall.

This is something I try to do with most of my projects :) Especially those that are gonna carry a lot of weight... if it can carry my weight without crashing it's mostly good enough... plus it has the added bonus that I get to work out a bit and do some pull ups :-)

Deep down inside I was praying it would hold...

When I started stacking up the cardboards I noticed they get some belly formed between the racks, due to the length between the racks, so I decided adding 2 supportive planks just to help holding the weight between the racks.

I simply cut to length 2 planks, used a countersink bit to drill a hole from the top of the rack and screwed them together.

And that was it!

Now that the racks were installed, I could finally take the cardboards out of the garage and pile them on the shelf :)