The Scrap Rack Page

With the price of steel going through the roof these days I hang onto 
whatever comes my way. My rule is it's gotta be at least 2' long and
something I've used in a project before, then I'll bring it home with
me. When I get a lot of something I make something out of it.

I live where it rains quite a bit. It's possible to store steel outside
but that makes using it a lot less pleasant because you have to remove
all the rust with a power wire brush first. That's a dirty, loud job
which gives black boogers and makes my hands numb, so I try to avoid it.
Unavoidably, I wind up with a pile of, well, scraps in my shop.

See the pictures ScrapPile1.jpg and ScrapPile2.jpg.

This is a mess! Not only that, I can't tell what I have, nor can I get
to anything. The stuff in front blocks the stuff in the back and lots
of things are balanced on end so if I perturb them slightly down goes
a whole bunch of steel with a crash. Not real good. In fact, this is
a problem.

I decided to try to improve things somewhat. One thing I didn't want to
do was to spend money, having a certain amount of Scotch ancestry. So
I decided that any solution would be fabricated entirely from scraps,
meaning the budget was *zero*. I thought for a long time about a rack
design, and finally came up with this one. It is mostly a prototype,
and I know already it isn't big enough. But it should work to prove the
concept of the design. This page presents my design and a few fabrication
details. It isn't real picture-intensive. I didn't drill any holes or
do any milling or lathe work - everything was layed out with a Sharpie
and a little square and a steel tape, cut off with an ancient horizontal
bandsaw, and all the holes were punched with a little bench punch. I
also did a smidge of welding. I might even paint it if I get a wild hair.

The materials I used were old bed frames (easy to come by for free), a
piece of old plate steel 22x36x3/8", four old swivel casters, a bunch
of old nuts and bolts a guy gave me which came out of an elevator company's
discarded packing material, and a few feet of 1" steel banding like you
see big stuff banded to pallets with on the back of a truck.

My design has a sturdy piece of steel plate for the base. This takes all
the weight, the rack is just something to lean stuff against. I welded on
the casters. Because I hate welding galvanized stuff, I soaked the 
casters (minus the wheels and axles) in lye which removed the zinc and
also reduced the iron oxide (rust) back to iron. No zinc, no rust, no
work. Cool, huh? Worked great! Then I welded the caster bodies onto the
plate, no nasty orange smoke, no coughing or headaches, no white powder.

The bed frame iron I got by running free ads on craigslist. I found a 
lot of people who had old bed frames for free if I hauled them away. I
spent about a day grinding off rivets and removing fittings just to 
wind up with a bunch of .120" angle iron in slightly varying sizes and
paint colors. I cut them all to length and punched the holes. 

A side note on punching vs. drilling: punching beats the heck out of
drilling! I lay out the hole and centerpunch it, then "find" the
centerpunch with the little tit on the end of the punch, and I get
the holes real close that way. Not sub-thou accuracy, but this ain't
no Swiss watch I'm building .. anyway, I have a little W.A. Whitney
No. 91 bench punch I use because it can punch to within 1/2" of the
inner edge of an angle. Flat bar I'd just punch with my ironworker.

I cut out little clips of angle and after punching them I bolted 
them tightly to the feet of the 4 uprights and using the miter gauge
on my disk sander set over to somewhere between 3 and 4°, I sanded
both the end of the upright and also the foot to the same angle.
I left them bolted tightly until I tack-welded the clips to the 
base plate, after which I removed the uprights, welded the clips
firmly, cleaned the welds, then bolted all back together tight
and right.

At this point I took the picture ScrapRackBeingBuilt.jpg. The end pieces
haven't gone on yet.

Then I made the end pieces and bolted them on, and I was home free. In just
a few minutes I'd separated my scrap pile into rectangular tube (includes square),
rectangular bar (includes square, flat, hex), pipe, and angle, and these went
into the 4 corners of the rack. I can roll the rack out now to get at something
I need, and because everything is stably leaning on something on its end, I can
always remove something without causing a landslide.

See the picture ScrapRackDone.jpg -- now *that's* a lot better!

Grant Erwin
For questions or to email me see http://www.tinyisland.com/email.html