Table Top Mount for Metal Shelving Units

Last crawled date: 4 years, 3 months ago

I needed a new printer storage area and thought I could adapt a 3 shelf metal unit (those ones with wire metal shelves and two or three piece corner rods where the shelves press down on a clamp. They're cheap, and often are chromed.)
I used a Wal-Mart purchased "Hyper Tough 3-shelf rolling cart" unit for this, but I've got ones in the basement that are not only assembled that way, but the corner posts are the same diameter.
This is an L-bracket shaped mount for a 22.4mm diameter corner rod. This seems to be a standard size (I used parts from another shelving unit from a couple years ago without any fitment issues). I think there are "heavier" duty ones that hold say, 50-lbs more (25kg-ish) per shelf and the rods are a different diameter so this may work for those if scaled up.
I opened up the screw holes to 4.5mm to take either M4 or #8 wood or sheet metal screws. For my "tabletop" I used a sheet of MDF from the hardware store.
This allowed me to create a tabletop that is more resistant to tipping (vs. an unsupported MDF top), it will fit my 3D printer, and by making a table top, I could convert the three shelves (one is a basket style) into full storage shelves for filament and printer tools.
If you need to add more friction to the print, and don't want to reprint it at a different scale, I'd suggest slowly shimming the rod tops with bits of electrical tape.
Individually, I think it takes about 2-2.5hrs to print, but if you put four on the build plate, it's more like 8.