A friend of mine lives across the street from a wine distributor, and recently found a heap of wooden wine-boxes on the sidewalk. Knowing that his clever DIY friends would probably want them, he dragged them in to his garage, then called his friends.

I grabbed as many as I could, and dragged them to my shop.

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Step 1: The Stuff!

In this Instructable I used the following goods:

8 Wooden Wine Crates
A bunch of A-Clamps
A drill
A 1/4" drill bit
Fistful of cable ties
pliers

Step 2: Rough Assembly

I figured out how I wanted to arrange the crates, then I roughly stacked them together - securing them with A-Clamps.

After I was happy with my positioning of the clamps and crates, I started mapping sets of holes for the cable ties to thread through. I wanted to make sure every adjacent wall would be secured to one another. Check out the image notes to understand where I was mapping my hole pattern.

Step 3: Fasten With Cable Ties.

I spaced the holes about two inches apart from eachother, and punched through both wine crates on each shared wall. After I made the holes, I threaded the cable ties through the holes, and secured the boxes to one another.

I secured the whole thing as I went, every time I made a set of holes, I would secure it with a cable tie - this way, I could move the same three clamps around as I went.

Step 4:

I was left with all these annoying staples in the fronts of the boxes, so I ripped them out with a pair of pliers. They are a bit tough to remove, this part of the project probably took the longest ;-D

This is the most secure/fastest shelf system I have ever built, and I plan to bust out a few more for other parts of my shop.

Participated in the
Instructables Green Design Contest

6 Comments

TheLandYacht

7 years ago

Looks like this idea would be just as awesome with milk-crates, easily accessible in some locations (and just listed "come get as many as you can carry" locally here on Craigslist)