I am in the process of creating french cleats so I can have various tools hanging along the wall. I am doing this to get rid of the random assortment of plastic molded boxes I have things sitting in around the base of my workbench.
Last weekend I took some extra 2x4s I had laying around and sent them through my planer to take the rounded edges off of them and to make them just a hair thinner. After running them through around 5 or 6 times, I then cut them to length on the table saw and eventually ripped them in half with a 45 degree cut.
I marked the studs and mounted them along the wall. I then made my first thing for them, a box to hold my two drills in along with a spot for the power cord.
Hindsight being 20/20, I learned a couple of lessons with this project. First is that I should have probably done this right the first time and just bought a sheet of 3/4″ plywood for the cleats along the wall and on the back of the holders. In the short term, what I did will work just fine but in the long term I will run into a problem when I find I need to make more cleats to hold things on. I will have to get 2x4s and dimensions them to the exact same thickness as what I have (not hard but annoying if you just want to get back to work). Also, 2x4s are obviously thicker than 3/4″ plywood so they just stand off the drywall more. This works but has a side effect that things are just hanging even further away from the wall.
Guess the project for this weekend will be to redo them and make more things to hold my tools. As a proof of concept, this was a perfect project!
