First Row Prototype

This is what the first row of the project looks like. I'm going to increase the height of the supports by 1/4" because the boards are a slightly tight fit, and I have the room. Currently, I'm a little worried that the ribs might sag in the middle, because there's nothing holding them up. However, I figure that when the modules are in the storage shelves, they'll hold up the middles quite nicely. For shelves that aren't populated, I can simply add some supports -- they're very small and inexpensive pieces of wood.

You might think of screwing the INREDA to the wood -- that doesn't work so well. The bottom of the INREDA is full of tiny little plastic domes, kind of like LEGO, and when you tighten that against the wood it tends to cause the ribs on the other side of the screw to widen apart, causing a deformity. My current thinking is to use Contact Cement, and see what happens.

2008 11 10 -- Contact Cement

The answer to "see what happens" when you use contact cement is ... "Kids, don't try this at home." It was an unmitigated disaster. The INREDA shrivelled and is now permanently warped, and there is a nice sticky mess on the wood. The contact cement bonded just fine to the wood, but only screwed up the INREDA.

So, I guess we'll just have to stick with screws and luck. (Luckily I had tried this on only one piece of INREDA and one section of wood. I'll probably be able to sand off the sticky mess and reuse the wood.)

2009 01 01 -- First Set Complete

S M L XL I've managed to complete the first set of shelves over the Christmas/New Years Holiday break.

Note that the powerpoint in the previous page implies that each "unit" would be six high, not three high. I found the three high to weigh enough (just the wood, let alone populated with modules) that I'm going to simply build them in "three high" units.

And the third set (2009 01 04). Once you get into the swing of it, and have done work on a "production line" basis, everything snaps together pretty quickly. This is 5 3-high modules, which represents 5/8ths of the complete single-high storage shelves. Some of the holders show definite "sagging." This is fine, because once you populate it with modules, the sagging disappears. As of this evening, I'm up to 6 units; my cordless screwdriver needs to be recharged, which is a sign to go have beer.

2009 01 11 -- Completed

Finally!

If I had to take a guess at home much time it took, I'd say about 4-5 days total. Money-wise, the project was completely within the budget (which is not that surprising -- the most expensive part was the IKEA INREDAs and they were easy to compute exactly how many would be required. Also, the project got scaled back a tiny bit; originally I was going to make 10 double-height holders (5 x 2 doubles) and 6 quad-height holders (3 x 2 quads), but due to space restrictions only ended up making 6 doubles and 4 quads).

The arrangement of the modules is alphabetic; I wrote a little program that took my inventory list and computed the location of each module, so that I could simply pick modules at random and place them in the right spot. I tried to leave 3 spaces after each module type in the single-height modules, for future expansion. The reason this doesn't look like the description is because my inventory list was obviously not 100% accurate. That's the problem with having modules spread out over dozens of boxes!

This picture shows the quad high module storage racks.