When I moved from Boston to Seattle I lost access to a machine shop that I could tinker in. I didn’t realize how important access to tools were to me until a few months in. This project was the first project I undertook without those resources and brought me back into tinkering.

The overall feel that I wanted for this design was industrial/minimal. I achieved this with a combination of pine boards and industrial cast iron piping.

The first iteration of this shelf utilized steel cabling tensioned with turnbuckles. I knew from past experience that stiffness and parallelism was difficult to achieve without perfect hole alignment and planar boards. I had neither and thus to compensate for warp I used the steel cabling to create trusses that would force things straight.

This concept worked for the most part, but board warpage and uneven tensile pulling from the cables prevented the shelf from being fully parallel/perpendicular. In addition the trusses created by cabling between the vertical supports were small and thus couldn’t provide much leverage to straighten the shelf out.

The solution to this was to forgo the steel cabling and instead rely on the stiffness provided by the drywall. By mounting wood blocks with hollow wall anchors and zip tying the post to them the rigidity of the entire shelf skyrocketed.