French Cleat Tool Wall - Ultimate Shop Organization

hello everyone and welcome back to my channel over the past month or so i've been transforming my garage into a woodworking shop part of that was disassembling my shelving and as i removed all the tools from my shelving i found that they ended up just migrating to the floor of the other side of the garage and that's got to change so today we are going to build a french cleat storage system in between these two windows in my garage once installed i will build customized containers for all of my tools allowing me to be organized and effective when working so let's get after it as a quick introduction for those that may not be familiar with what a french cleat system is you've essentially got a network of wall mounted cleats with a 45 degree angle upwards like this and you've got a series of containers for your tools and equipment that have a opposing 45 degree wedge cleat on the back side and as you pick up your various containers on the system and move it around those two wedges lock an interface and actually hold this entire container in place and you can see the overlapping section on the bottom container provides a flat surface for this to press up against so that it doesn't bend in on itself like this now the nice thing about a french cleat system unlike a traditional you know system of screws or even a pegboard is that it's extremely flexible so if you want to take a particular item and move it around it allows you to switch it up so once you find yourself using one container more than another you can shift the priorities around and reorganize your tools to best suit your workflow i'm going to start this project by building the french cleat wall in between the two windows in my garage the wall is going to be made of three-quarter inch plywood which comes in four foot by eight foot sheets now these are awkward to work with because they can weigh up to 70 pounds and they're just really awkward to handle so i elected not to use my table saw and instead used my newly created workbench to overhang a little bit of the excess plywood off the end of my workbench and use a circular saw to make the distance between the two windows was around six feet so i cut about two feet off the end of this plywood sheet i used the remaining six foot section to create the bottom part of the french cleat wall now i had to get creative with setting this up because i'm working by myself so i used some scrap wood to prop it up on the wall and make sure it was level once i was happy with orientation of the plywood i then used the scribe lines as reference markers for where the studs were behind the drywall and drove some long wood screws through the plywood to reach the studs until i had enough screws driven to remove the scrap wood underneath that was supporting the plywood this gave me the opportunity to make one last check for level before finishing driving the rest of the screws into the drywall you can see here that there were about five screws per scribe line so this stuff isn't going anywhere with the bottom piece level and in place i turned my attention to the top part of the french cleat wall now you can see here that i'm gonna have to notch out a small little rectangle for the power outlet which i did by taking some reference measurements from the edge of the french cleat wall and then transcribing them onto the upper piece before i put it up onto the wall once i had those measurements i used a speed square just to trace out where the wall plate was going to go and with that trace i came back with a jigsaw and just cut out that notch [Music] now that we've got the top and the bottom plywood attached to the wall you can see all the different fasteners that i've got there we're going to start ripping the french cleats we've got some leftover plywood on that side of the garage and we've also got a couple of extra sheets that i haven't even cut yet so we're going to start ripping those into the two and a half inch plywood cleats to make the french cleats i started off by ripping a five inch wide section of three-quarter inch plywood now one of the things i learned throughout this process is that it's better to make too many cleats than not enough because once you get your saw set up just right to make these you can pump them out pretty quickly but if you have to go back and make more they're quite time consuming because of some of the intricacies in the next step which i'll go over in a second so i made quite a few here but i wish i would have made more once you've got your five inch wide boards you then tilt your saw blade to 45 degrees to begin ripping the wrench cleats themselves now to do this i took a scrap piece of wood that was five inches wide and i just started to cut a notch into the board and i took a ruler just to see if both sides of the 45 degree cut were equal this will ensure that all the french cleats that you make are identical and you won't have any problems with fit or height adjustments later i made a slight adjustment to my table saw fence flipped the piece over and measured it one more time and once i was happy i then started ripping all those five inch boards straight in half to make the long french cleat rails so these french cleats are going to be used for both the actual french cleat board as well as the various accessories and containers that are going to come in a later step with all those 45 degree rips we now have some french cleats that we can install on this board i've just run some quick math and i don't think i'm going to have enough so i may have to go round two but i'm gonna start getting these up on the board just to make some progress i'm gonna i know it's easier to work down and come up so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to try to match it up to where a french cleat straddles that seam because there's a little bit of a imperfection in the way that that was cut what i'm going to do is have a cleat straddle that seam to hide it and so i'm going to start by marking five inches in between each of the cleats because the two cleats put together are four inches so you want to have a little bit of room to actually put in the item that's going to hang off the french cleat so i'm going to start here and then mark five inches down and get my bottom most rung and i'll probably be 18 or 24 inches off the ground before i start because i'm not going to hang anything that low and then i'll work my way up to secure the french cleats onto the wall i'm going to be using a combination of wood glue and brad nails now if you were going to intend to have something heavy hanging off your french cleat system say anything above 10 or 15 pounds it's probably worth going and reinforcing with some wood screws but for the tools that i'm going to be hanging off the french cleat system wood glue and brad nails are more than enough support for what i need i started off by putting in a single brad nail and then using the level to make sure that i had a completely level surface it's important to get this one right because everything else will be referenced off this bottom most french cleat to expedite this part of the process i made two spacers using some leftover french cleat from the previous step and just used that to stack up and secure the next french cleats that were going in place i was using my level to make sure that everything was remaining level and true to the original french cleat railing that went on but this part of the process went pretty quickly thanks to these spacers this is the main reason why you start at the bottom and work your way up so that this part of the process goes as smooth as possible [Music] wall is done i ended up having to go back and rip some more cleats to fit on the on the backer panel but now comes the fun part of creating all the individual storage containers to put all the tools a lot of these containers are just going to be custom fit for the tools that i'm putting up on the french cleat wall some of the heavier tools like this i'm going to give a dedicated box to but in terms of the design you really just find a way to make the tool and the space work so what i'm thinking about doing on this one is making a platform to hold the tool and it'll need to be about seven inches wide yeah seven inches wide and then underneath the tool maybe putting some hangers to hang these belts that are there the platform is going to be um we'll go with eleven inches wide seven inches deep maybe eight inches or nine inches tall i'm going to sketch this up and then get to cutting once we get the parts cut i'll start assembling and then i'll walk through the process and this was by far my favorite part of this project because you have complete creative freedom to do whatever it is that you want to do and the french cleat system provides a lot of flexibility to accommodate containers with different shapes and sizes to fit the needs you've got so i went through this same process for all of the containers that i built but you see me here walking through the process of how i designed the container for the belt sander now that i've got the first couple of pieces cut i can start arranging how i would like this to look one thing i want to point out you'll notice on a couple of these pieces that the veneer on top of the plywood can sometimes chip out so just keep that in mind as you're orienting each piece together try to keep edges that have been blemished like this at a line of sight what i've planned on doing is leaving a little bit of a lip you can kind of see there's a little bit of a lip in on top and that's going to serve as a ledge to retain the sander so it doesn't fall i've got rough marks of where those wood pieces were i'm going to come through with my speed square just to make sure that everything is along the same axis and align properly this will just be a rough indication of where i need to put each of these as i'm marking them for gluing first step in the glove i'm going to take i'm going to find that edge that got a little bit nicked up by the table saw i'm going to glue up the actual platform part first and you'll see me using tight bond 3. you certainly don't have to use it that's actually the only wood glue that i have left right now i've been doing some other projects with my tight bond one and just don't have anything left so we're using type bond three for this [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] um and this is how the final product turned out you can see that it's compact functional and all the accessories and the components that are associated with the belt sander are in one place so that you can easily grab and go off the wall for whatever project that you're working on and that to me is why i chose the french cleat system to help organize my shop gives you flexibility and allows you to create customized storage solutions for the equipment that you have and then continually rearrange them in a space that is most convenient for the tools that you're using on a regular basis and i've repeated this process for the rest of my tools trying to group up similar pieces of equipment together or things i might use on a similar project just to make it that much more functional my approach to arranging things on the board was to put tall items to the sides heavier items on the bottom and most frequently used tools right in the middle i can't tell you how happy i was to see those tools migrating from the shop floor back into an organized space that's going to be it for this video i hope that you've learned something that you can take back to your workshop to help improve your organization of your tools and equipment thanks for watching and i'll see you on the next one [Music] you

Channel: Eigen Designs

Views: 60,332

Keywords: woodworking, workshop, workship, workbench, ultimate, plywood, planer, jointer, clamps, rockler, french cleat, french, cleat, shop organization, tool organization, woodworking organization

Id: Oz_10vXk96Y

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021