Shopsmith Forums

I'm a firm believer of never hanging anything from ceiling trusses they simply aren't engineered to support the weight.

Therefore when I built my overhead storage I built two wall cabinets firmly attached to the wall. The one in the corner which is strickly a walll cabinet since I also had the adjoining wall to attach into. However the cabinet at the other end went down to the floor.

This cabinet supports one end of the overhead storage. I built it using 2x4 glued and lead anchored to the wall behind it. I then covered the 2x4 with 1/2 ply again all nailed and glued with the 3 top shelves glued and anchored to the wall and to sides and front of the cabinet.

Now my problem I needed/wanted the floor space where the cabinet sat. I convinced my self I could cut the cabinet below the third shelf and remove everything from there down. That the top portion would act like a super shelf bracket and would support that end of the overhead storage without going the whole way to the floor. I did it, I cut the bottom half off and everything stayed up. But I'm worried. Did I build a disaster waiting to happen?

I'm wonder if I should put in a diagonal brace from the outside corner of the overhead shelf down to the wall. Or whether I should get some heavy duty shelf brackets and try to put them inside the cabinet or on the bottom of it.

Any ideas? Let me say I have the overhead storage loaded, the cabinet loaded and everything seems to be holding, though I did hear some creaks
Ed

It would seem to me that the cabinet would be seriously weakend (sp?). I wounder if there would be an issue with weight distribution. I remember one cabinet I hung for my wife. A few days after she had loaded it with quart jars of tomato juice we had heard some creaking. That happened just before the cabinet fell to the floor. The screws holding it had stripped out of the studs they were screwed into. Fortunately none of the jars broke. Oh well, another one of life's lessons learned.

BPR

Ed, if you want to get rid of the remainder of the cabinets - double up your ceiling joists by attaching another 2X to the side with lag bolts. this will really increase the load bearing weight. I don't have a handbook that gives those specs, but when building the upstairs in my old home in MT, I doubled the 6" old ceiling joists (the lower level ceiling had been leveled leaving the 6 inchers) and used them for floor joists for the upstairs. So essentially, I had 4"X6" joists that extended 10 feet. This was approved as adequate floor support at that length.