Strong Floating Shelves - The Strongest Option

my first experience with building a floating shelf was about a year and a half ago when a customer wanted several them over the top of office furniture I was building for her I did a video on that to share my experience of constructing that first floating shelf I've always had the attitude that floating shelves were a little bit of a gimmick and not particularly useful because of the perception that I did not think they could be made to be very strong boy did I turn out to be wrong about that I have since done a complete flip-flop in my thinking about floating shelves and since that first one I've continued to explore different ways of building them to make them as strong as they can potentially be each attempt since that first video I have documented and I'll have a link to that playlist at the conclusion of this video the first video went on to become one of my most viewed on my channel I'll have a link to that in the description below if you're interested in checking that one out the idea for this video came from a suggestion by someone about possibly using an iron pipe for shelf support which kind of got me to thinking about that I started playing with that thought and decided to use an awl thread rod instead of a pipe for the shelf supports I think this is probably going to become the simplest way to construct a strong clothing shelf that I can think of let me take you through my evolution process for building floating shelves and then show you how I insert a 5/8 inch steel all-thread rod into studs to serve as shelf supports so the basic design I have used when building floating shelves out of wood has been to cut inch and a half by inch and a half pieces to form my backer board that gets screwed to the wall and then attached shelf support pieces of the same size by using wood dowels or wood screws and glue to hold the shelf supports in place then that assembly is taken to the wall and positioned so that it can be secured to studs with lag bolts I've also used wood dowels to secure this to the wall as well with good success in some of my other videos finally the Shelf is finished off by building a shell that slips over this assembly mounted to the wall and the shell can be made out of any number of materials and finished any way you want the idea behind using threaded metal rods for shelf support assumes that you can spin the rods into threaded holes in the studs if that can be done easily it's possible that the weight capacity of the shelf has increased a great deal maybe to the point that it's not even a concern any longer it's also likely that the same type of frames that are typically used for floating shelves may be adapted to slip over the rods I will be adding a front piece to the shelf supports so that the rods can pass through it as well to give added strength in thinking about this one of the big challenges is to be able to drill straight into the studs so that when the all-thread rock when it is installed it's perpendicular or at a 90 degree angle to the face of the studs the best way to approach this or at least one way to approach this is to build a jig that has holes drilled into it on the drill press which I know to be at a 90 degree angle to the table of the drill press and if I stack a couple of these pieces together and use them as a guide for drilling pilot hole into the stud that really should give me the results I'm looking for but the only way to know for sure is to check it when the all-thread rod is installed into the stuff packing off the piece of my long all thread about seven or eight inches long to create the tap to cut the threads in the wood I'm not going to get too carried away with this by I am cutting some relief slots in the rod to allow the wood shavings to have a place to go when they're being cut and then I'll sand the threads down a little bit at the top of the tab to make it easier to get it started in the pilot hole I'm starting out with doing a little experimentation with the awl thread and the blocks I'm going to be using for the pilot holes if I could develop some kind of tool to make it easier to put equal pressure on the 5/8 inch thread tap tool that I'm building it would make sense I'm going to get the best results with the tab so I enlisted the help of my son Ryan to help me put this together he took about a 13 inch piece of square tubing and welder the 5/8 inch nut in the center of it with an additional piece of metal in between the nut and the tubing for extra strength here's the way the tool turned out and I used it to cut some threads into my jig for drilling the holes into the studs just for practice and to see how it worked then I'll remount those threads a little when I'm ready to drill the pilot holes into the studs for real the holes I drilled on the drill press are with a 9/16 inch bit which should be perfect for cutting threads into the hole with a 5/8 inch all thread rod you know that looks pretty good so let's give it a try in the real world application be drilling my holes really right here for these two studs got a thermostat wire here that is not really in play it's coming down from the ceiling see I'm hitting stud right there and another stud right here however on this side let's see I've got this electric light coming on so I'm not completely sure that my plugs and my light switches here not connected with with wiring so I need to drill a hole into the sheetrock to take a look at where I'll be drilling into my stud make sure I'm not entering into an area where there are some wires that gotta pinch potentially hits I don't want to do that so there's my stud which is fine and you can see that going this is a 2x6 wall I've got no wiring at all going through that stud so I'm clear to drill into it well I have my sheetrock hole cut out piece handy I'm throwing a piece of backing into the hole and screwing the sheetrock piece back in place so I can tape and retexture this area the attempt at the first hole drilling into my stud goes fine that success is going to be short-lived I've drawn the level line across each stud I'm intending to hit that I line up my jig on but on the second hole I hit something hard about an inch into the stud and obviously it isn't going anywhere it turns out for some reason there's an additional block nailed to the side of my stud now I just happened to drill right into one of the nails holding it in place so Plan B in my case is to drop my level line about an inch reposition my jig and drill two more holes only this time I got about an eighth of an inch into the sheetrock before I hit one of the screws holding the sheetrock to the studs I guess I could have pulled the screw but I was getting irritated by now so I dropped my level line a third time and try it again [Music] this time both holes drilled up nicely and with the use of my jig I've got about two inches of depth into the studs but should be about as close to being perpendicular to the wall as I could come up with for any other methods in order to get enough depth into the studs with the all threads I'm estimating that maybe two and a half inches from my pilot hole into the wood to be a good number there's nothing scientific about that depth of hole but it does seem reasonable at least so adding the half inch thickness of sheetrock my blue masking tape marks the depth I want so this is turning out to be a pretty simple process so far the only real challenge has been trying to drill a couple of holes that aren't packed with metal the handle and all thread cutter seem to be working just like you hope they would I've put two nuts on the all thread cutter that I tighten against the nut welded on the handle that basically gives you enough friction at the handle to be able to screw the cutter into the pilot hole and then back it back out when you bottomed out I'm just trying to carefully and slowly thread them into the pilot hole and keep twisting with a little pressure towards the stud alright so I'm in about two and three-quarter inches right there that's gonna be pretty darn close then hopefully again this is going to be level and perpendicular with the wall it's pretty good it should be good squeak sounds good so now I can thread my handle back on my rods that I'm using for my shelf supports I'll throw the nuts on there just to give me the ability to tighten those up against my handle and then should be able to thread the rods in place permanently now and that should be all there is if this all goes well should be all there is to this shelf support system all right that is bottom down right there so I don't want to go much more because that will then start stripping the wood threads I would think hopefully these things are now level right I mean that is what we want right there it's hard to imagine that this is not the strongest floating shelf support approach that I've experimented with so far when you flip from wood support to steel support the whole game changes so let me finish up this video by trying a couple of approaches to building shelves to slip over these steel rods now for the few of you out there that may be bugged because I messed up my wall again to do another floating shelf experiment I will do a quick patch job on the sheetrock so that you can enjoy the rest of the video to quickly address the strength questions when I put my 200 pounds of weight on the ends of these rods you can see a little bit of flex which you would expect but there's no concern at all about the rods breaking off or potentially failing in any way for just normal use these all thread rod shelf supports weigh exceed any weight capacity I would ever put on them so my basic approach for building a frame for the floating shelf works fine with the steel rods you have the option in this case of securing the frame to the wall by running bolts onto the all threads to Snug to frame up against the wall such like this type of an approach you can slip the brackets over the all threads bring them out through this front piece just a little bit to give the front edge and support of the steel as well and then trim out the fronts and sides with finished material and then cover the top and bottom with quarter inch pieces of material as well to give you a nice finished solid look that's one approach so here's the second approach where I've taken to the horse and cut about two inch pieces drilled holes on the drill press so it would slip over the rods easily and so made of solid shelf here which is an interesting idea also you want something a little more decorative and that's very solid this is certainly way to go trick now is to secure the shelf to the hall threads one way to do it would be these drill small holes and run little bolts down onto the thread itself maybe file off the threads where the where the bolt penetrates the wood and touches the all thread and you're screwed tighten that down so that would give some resistance as in a set screw type of approach another idea would be to enlarge the hole basically and large enough to be able to recess a washer that slides over the end of the all thread and then screw a bolt on the end which would give you a count of the Indust of saying the bolt embedded in the end of the shelf another way to do it anyway nice look nice approach to the shelf here also it's kind of left up to your imagination as to how you may want to approach something like this the main point is well these things are are really solid I have to say that doing the work that I've done with floating shelves just experimenting with them this has to be the best way for me going forward to do this type of thing I think I can figure out easy ways to make sure I'm not hitting any wires potentially and at that stage all that is is just drilling a couple of pilot holes and then threading those holes with a little tool that that we created to do that spin these things in and got you have a strong sprung set up if you're still curious about floating shelves let me encourage you check out this playlist that's on the screen it goes through my process of trying to figure these silly things out and come up with ways that work best for me thanks for watching

Channel: Rusty Dobbs

Views: 714,143

Rating: 4.8681002 out of 5

Keywords: floating shelf, floating shelves, diy floating shelves, make floating shelves, install a floating shelf, strong floating shelves, floating shelf bracket, how to build a floating shelf, how to build floating shelves, how to hang a floating shelf, strongest floating shelf, strongest floating shelves, floating shelf installation, floating shelf hardware, floating shelf for tv, floating shelf ideas, floating shelves design

Id: BpS_MEHfgac

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2019