Bandsaw Blade Storage - Easy, Inexpensive & Convenient

During the over fifty years I've been making sawdust, storing the blades used on the tools used to create projects has always been a challenge. Both for me and many other woodworkers.

One reason storing blades is so troublesome is, we end up using every square foot of shop walls and floors for storage of tools, patterns, jigs and other things related to the hobby or profession. As such, there isn't always a lot of wall space available.

Add to the issue of space the fact many of the methods of storage are heavy, bulky and consume a lot of material.

It may be we can solve part of the storage problem by going up. That is, using the ceiling. Of course, unless engineered for it, ceilings wont hold significant loads (e.g., wood storage), so we can only do this for relatively light things. Fortunately, there are many light things that can be suspended from ceilings without taxing the integrity of the trusses. Band saw blades are one of those things, providing, of course, their storage means isn't overly heavy.

Over the years, I've tried several of the suggested ways of storing band saw blades. Unfortunately, most required a lot of room, were heavy and/or required using a lot of material. As they say, there had to be a simpler way.

When I set out to devise a more efficient means of storing bandsaw blades, I kept several things in mind:

1) The storage had to protect the blades, if only by keeping them out of harms way;

2) The storage had to be relatively inexpensive (e.g, used scraps and minimal amount of materials);

3) The blade storage had to be able to store all the blades for the band saw; and,

4) Accessing the blades needed to be relatively easy, which includes being able to determine things like the width of the blade, the teeth per inch and the grind (e.g., rake and hook).

My [current] final version of a band saw blade storage meets all those requirements because:

1) It meets all the criteria set out above;
2) It's easy to move about, because can be connected parallel to or ninety degrees to the rafters;

3) You can put any size blades on it (when I went from 92-1/2" blades to 105" blades, they had to be pressed into the former storage, so it should have been built to accommodate them from the get go; and,
4) You can see the blades and the large clips seen at the bottoms of the blades have information taken from their original boxes giving details about the blade (e.g.,Olson blades, Timberwolf blades, 3 TPI blade, 1/2" blade).

Step 1:

To construct this, I just needed scrap plywood, boards or even tempered board (e.g., Masonite) and a few screws or nails.

Pretty much any thickness plywood would do. For the few blades seen in my photos, even quarter inch (1/4") Masonite would do to support them, including the vertical sides. I would, however, add thicker pieces of ply for the top, simply to provide more meat for drilling holes and mounting the rack to the ceiling.

I allowed about one and one half inch (1-1/2") at each end for the vertical supports. Since the part the blades hang on was only two and three quarters inch (2-3/4) wide, including the access slot, the stop and the blade rest area, for each of ten blades, my entire rack is ABOUT thirty inches long.

The open area I slip the blades up through, to hang them, is one inch. Sliding the blade left, or right, from the other side, the gap is one half (1/2"), before the blade drops to its resting place. The actual resting place for the blade is one inch (1) wide and merely needs to drop lower than the stop.

Hopefully, it's clear the measurements I used could be modified to accommodate wider blades, or to make the blades easier to slip in and out.

I made the sides by simply using two pieces of ply to sandwich the blade support and another piece at the top the same length as the bottom, blade storage area.

Since building this, I've added insulation to the ceiling, so had to mount this to the bottoms of the trusses. To allow me to shift the rack to the underside of the trusses, I added pieces, at the top and running from support to support, to add thickness allowing me to drill through it and use screws to mount it anywhere I wanted to.