DEAL ALERT Portamate Wood Rack

[cincinnati]

On clearance at Lowes $19.99

http://www.lowes.com/pd_752430-23796-PB ... =portamate

[BuckeyeDennis]

Dang! I paid twice that price each for four of them, ON SALE at Woodcraft.

[claimdude]

Picked up a couple of these yesterday evening. Hard deal to pass up.

Jack

[BuckeyeDennis]

There's a couple of things to keep in mind with these racks. First of all, the photo shows a rack supporting the boards only at each end. I figured that was a recipe for sagging/bowed boards. After a bit of research, I concluded that mounting the standards to ever other wall stud (i.e. 32" on center) would provide adequate support for 3/4" boards. Worst case, a board overhangs the last support by about 15".

rack.jpg (40.94 KiB) Viewed 3654 times

Second, a single unit only provides 4' of vertical storage. If you want to go full height on a wall, you'll need both an upper set and a lower set. That's why I bought four sets -- it's full wall height and the standards span 8', not including overhang at the end. So my setup is good for 10' boards.

Getting all those standards well aligned is not trivial. If memory serves, I fastened a temporary ledger board for a horizontal reference, and then used a story stick to lay out the mounting holes.

Now here's the part that could drive you to drink. The mounting angle of the supports is not very consistent. The angle is controlled by the dimensions of the cutout that slips over the standards, and there is no provision for adjustment. If you mount the supports at random, a row of supports will not line up well -- the height of the outer ends of the supports will vary by up to half an inch of so. Not good. So what I did was test-mount all 48 supports, and sort them by mounting angle. Then I used "consecutive" sorted supports to fill out each row. At the end of the day, there were only three or four outliers that had to be shimmed.

So installation was a bit of a PITA, but it make for an attractive, sturdy rack when done. Plus, since the steel supports are only about 1-1/4" thick, they take up much less vertical height than wooden ones would. I can and do store about 600 board-feet of lumber in a 10' section of wall, and that's with just a 7' ceiling. That lets me buy lumber in bulk when a good deal pops up on Craigslist, which around here means native hardwoods at about a dollar per bf. At at the current Lowes price, all that storage capacity can be had for only $80.