tool_scrounge
Well-known member
Years back I purchased way too many Craftsman rebranded pry bars when Sears was blowing them out. I do use them but disliked how much tool box drawer space they consumed. Hanging them in a rack was the obvious solution. The prime location was attached to a storage rack high above my workbench. I did look at available pry bar racks, but was not happy with the pry bar density and stiffness of construction.
On concern is that if an earthquake happened, I did not want my obituary to read “Southern California man dies in freak accident getting impaled by his own pry bars”. So I decided to make my own rack with taller walls to prevent the pry bars from falling out.
Fortunately, I had a 50” piece of aluminum C channel that had a cross section of 3” X 1.7” with 0.25” walls in the junk pile. All I needed to do was machine off some welded plates.
I had enough material to make two 24” wide racks to match the 24” depth of the storage racks. Each rack was designed to hold 10 pry bars on 2.4” spacing. I drilled the holes for the pry bars a little under sized and used a band saw to use out the pry bar slots.
At this point I could have filed the slots to clean them up. But since I had access to a milling machine, I cleaned the slots up nicely with a long 5/8” diameter mill cutter. The slot ranged in size from 0.63 to 1” wide.
Below is a photo of one of the racks. Overall I am pretty happy with the result. If my job had me pushing around a tool box some distance, I would make a similar rack to keep my pry bars secure.
On concern is that if an earthquake happened, I did not want my obituary to read “Southern California man dies in freak accident getting impaled by his own pry bars”. So I decided to make my own rack with taller walls to prevent the pry bars from falling out.
Fortunately, I had a 50” piece of aluminum C channel that had a cross section of 3” X 1.7” with 0.25” walls in the junk pile. All I needed to do was machine off some welded plates.
I had enough material to make two 24” wide racks to match the 24” depth of the storage racks. Each rack was designed to hold 10 pry bars on 2.4” spacing. I drilled the holes for the pry bars a little under sized and used a band saw to use out the pry bar slots.
At this point I could have filed the slots to clean them up. But since I had access to a milling machine, I cleaned the slots up nicely with a long 5/8” diameter mill cutter. The slot ranged in size from 0.63 to 1” wide.
Below is a photo of one of the racks. Overall I am pretty happy with the result. If my job had me pushing around a tool box some distance, I would make a similar rack to keep my pry bars secure.