Watch This Before Building A French Cleat Wall!

all right that's not going anywhere my fellow crafts writes i've been hesitant to put french cleats on my wall for a while now as you can tell because just by all of their benefits i think they have one really big flaw and that's being able to easily knock things off of them john hines from my build it has a video about this and he suggests slat walls instead of french cleats but i thought there had to be an easy way to lock french cleats in they're such a good system why isn't there an easy way to do this so i did some digging around [Applause] i found a lot of really ingenious solutions to lock french cleats in place but to be honest they all seemed very difficult or to be frank they were just over engineered they didn't cut the mustard but then it hit me keys not these kind but the kind used in machinery to lock things in place after mocking up a design in fusion 360 and prototyping it i think i found the answer to easy lockable french cleats let me show you how to make them real quick before we hit the table saw let's talk about something all over the internet there's a lot of information about how to perfectly cut a board in half at 45 degree angles so that each side is symmetrical but what no one seems to be talking about is how wide does this board need to be so that when we do cut it in half at 45 degrees we end up with a cleat that is a specific height so let me show you the magic formula the magic formula cleat height times two minus thickness of the material minus the curve of your saw blade so in this example i'm going to be making two inch tall cleats from half inch material so the math looks like 2 inches times 2 is 4 half inch thickness minus eighth of an inch kerf is three eighths four minus three eighths three and five eighths now i like to put a pretty heavy chamfer on my french cleats about an eighth of an inch actually so i add an extra quarter of an inch to this measurement you don't have to do this but i would recommend it which equals three and seven eighths so by the time that this is halved at a 45 degree and then eighth of an inch chamfer taken off i end up with perfectly 2 inch tall cleats now to make the locking french cleats work one cleat will go against the wall and it's going to be a little bit taller the cleat that actually goes on the fixtures on the things that go on the wall is a little bit shorter so this is a perfect matching pair these are actually both going to turn into wall cleats so we'll actually need to make a separate strip to cut our fixture cleats from just to give you an example of that math again the fixture cleats are going to be an inch and 5 8. so same math three and a quarter minus three eighths two and seven eighths i like to add that chamfer you don't have to do it two and seven eighths plus a quarter is three and an eight so that'll be the size of the fixture cleats let's go to the table saw and actually cut those and you can probably see what i'm talking about so we'll cut the wall cleats first and those are going to be cut at three and seven eights and if you don't have a steel rule in your shop i highly suggest you get one is probably the easiest and most accurate way to set up fences now that all the strips that are going to be halved at a 45 are cut for the wall cleats it makes sense since the blade is still 90 degrees to move the fence over to the specific distance and cut the same strips for the fixture cleats so let's do that and then we'll tilt this to 45 and have them [Music] my favorite way to have one of these at a 45 degree angle is the first to find the center point which in this case is an inch and 15 16. strike a line and then i'm also going to find the midpoint this way i'm just going to eyeball it and then with a combo square i'm going to line up that center mark and strike a line now we'll go to the table saw and i'll show you how to line this up so to line this up i'm just going to find one of the flat teeth put it on my piece and then just move the fence over until that tooth perfectly splits my line or as close to perfectly splitting it as i can and then lock it in now i'll do a test cut where i just cut into this a little bit and then i'll measure each side to make sure that they're equal and symmetrical if not i'll just adjust this a tiny little bit one way or the other until i get to that point so now that i've got this symmetrical obviously one of these pieces is just going to turn into a scrap board but now that it's symmetrical i can run the rest of them through at 45 and split the cleats off [Applause] okay we got all of our cleats cut for the most part we still have to shamper this edge off but as you can see they are nice and symmetrical same height so to do that all we got to do is set the table saw to our final width zip run those through but i did want to point out you might have noticed i was using two push sticks right the reason being the shape of this right here is really really good at mimicking this which is the typical thing right so let's pretend we're running this through a table saw and this is the fence you usually press your finger up against it to get sideways pressure your thumb to hold it down and you run the baby through but when you're doing a 45 degree cut and this isn't very wide the blade is right here so you're not going to want to do that with your fingers not to mention you do that often enough this sharp edge is going to give you a bunch of little paper cut so in this case you can just plywood cuts that's why i like using this it kind of mimics the same thing you can press up against the tables or you can press up against the fence this little thumb holds her down you take your other push stick pop her through check that out i even somehow managed to stack them for myself yeah it doesn't happen very often real quick before we throw the cleats onto the wall the other thing i forgot to mention was figuring out how many of these you actually need the math is really easy since these are two inches and the spacer i'm going to use to divide them equally as two inches all you have to do is take the height of your board or your wall and divide it by four and you're good to go and then before throwing it on the wall i've already pre-measured where the studs are going to be on this and i'm just going to pre-drill some holes little countersinks so off camera i made this little pencil holder fixture and to attach it to the wall actually to attach the cleat to the back of it i'm going to put it on the wall where i want it which is with the top and bottom overlapping the cleat you can build these in increments of four since these are two inch cleats with two inch spacers you can do four inch backs eight inch backs 12 inch as long as it's an inch increment of 4 and then reduce it by about a half inch on each side and that'll leave you enough gap to fill up the entire wall so you take the cleat slip it in behind line it up where you want make a mark on the fixture and then i'm just going to go glue and brad nail this to the back of the picture so i'll be right back i got the cleat attached to the back of the fixture now you notice when it goes on the wall that there's a little gap there and that's on purpose that's also the reason why we made sure that the fixture went above this cleat and below this one a little bit so that that gap would be enclosed the reason being at the table saw i ripped off some strips of plywood that fit this gap minus about a sixteenth so there's a little bit of room for play [Music] and then at the miter saw i cut these little reliefs in so you can easily grab it with a finger and with this you now have a key that you can slide in that slot still move the fixture around but it is not going anywhere without either breaking the fixture or breaking the wall and it's still easy to move you want to move it to a different cleat pop the key out move it up move it down put the key back in locked in not going anywhere now you're a smart cookie you've already figured out that with this setup having a wall here and molding here i have to move this fixture over all the way to get the cleat out each time i want to take it off that's fine as long as i put nothing else on this shelf but as soon as i put something on this cleat i can't get the key out on this one anymore there's a couple ways around that one is to not make a cleat that's the full length of the fixture you could just make tiny short cleats and go on each side and as long as there's something in there this fixture can't move up which means it can't release off of its cleat so long as gravity is in effect which you know usually is the other way around that which i personally like is to actually create a relief cut here so that you can slip a key in behind a fixture without moving it or moving the one next to it so let me show you how to do that i'm just going to take the location of this cleat and bring it around to the front i'm also going to add 9 16 to it so a half inch plus a little more i'm going to find about halfway down the fixture and we're going to drill a hole there just so we have a nice radius [Music] now if you don't have a band saw to cut this obviously you can do it with either a jigsaw or a handsaw or there's probably several different ways to do it but we just cut this relief out and now i'll show you how that works so we've got our fixture we're putting another one here and if this was solid there'd be no room to slip a key in so what we did is cut a hole out and then i took a key and i chamfered the back edges on them and now it just slips right in place we can butt that up against that one and that can't come out but because of those little finger cuts we did simply pull it out grab it take the key out move it wherever you want put it next to something slip the key in locked this particular one is a place to hold my coffee i apologize about the lighting i'm filming in a corner and it's really hard to get good light in here but for longer fixtures you can even do two cleats to help keep the bottom in and i actually recommend doing the chamfer on all of your keys now because it just it really makes slipping them in there a lot easier just like that oh don't have a lock in that one locked in secure french cleats if you found there was something in this video i didn't cover about how to make locking french cleats make sure to ask me down in the comments below i'll do my best to respond as quickly as i can in the meantime you can check out either one of these videos up here and make sure that you click the subscribe button down below keep up the good work [Applause] enhance enhance

Channel: Craftswright

Views: 640,866

Keywords: locking french cleat, locking french cleat system, french cleat, french cleat shelves, french cleat system, french cleat tool holder, french cleat tool storage, french cleat wall, locking french cleats, diy french cleat, how to make a french cleat, french cleats, diy garage, diy projects, diy tool storage, garage storage, garage tool storage, garage wall shelving, projects, simple wood projects, tool, tool box, tool rack, tool storage, woodworking projects, Craftswright

Id: M5NnFkpUXmY

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Coclav]

As someone living in Europe and measuring things in mm /cm it never occurred to me that you guys were actually making math with all these fraction number !! The video takes another epic level of complexity. Last time I had to do calculation on fractions was at school.

[u/RumbleStripRescue]

Taught my father in law french cleats when hanging all my cabinets in the shop years ago, he looked at me as if I were a wizard casting some unknown magic. So beautifully simple and effective! Over the years I’ve found angles a little shy of 45 and the mentioned chamfer prevents some of the perpendicular force against the fasteners. Great tutorial, thanks for sharing.