expedit question
Mike_Bell
5,736 Posts
Good morning, SS.
Quick question...do you need to mount an Expedit to the wall? Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Quick question...do you need to mount an Expedit to the wall? Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Comments
http://www.homedepot.com/p/E-Z-Ancor-Twist-N-Lock-50-Self-Drilling-Drywall-Anchors-with-Screws-6-Pack-11353/100171703
Do not use these for something the size and weight of a fully loaded expedit. Always anchor an expedit into a stud with mounting straps or heavy duty L brackets. Kids get killed from falling shelves all the time and plastic anchors in sheet rock are not good enough. Even if you don't have kids an expedit could do some damage to an adult if it fell.
Good point.
There are 75 and 100 pound anchors available. When using four of them the expedits are pretty solid.
Using a stud is definitely ideal. But if your shelf doesn't line up with a stud you'll have to use some sort of wall anchor.
I'm all for mounting.
If something does fail the failure will be at the weakest point. Studs and l brackets are strong so the expedite would fail.
^ I am talking about a catastrophic event here. Any mounting is better than none, and into the stud is better than dry wall, and distributed load is better than putting all the load on one point.
Volumen, can you find an image of how you would mount with straps?
that said, what you've done should be fine, barring catastrophic conditions, but it's not the mounts I would doubt, it's what they're mounted to.
The straps are often supplied with the shelf. They are basically just a flexible L bracket. They are usually a couple inches long with an eye grommet on each end to put a screw through. You attach one end to the top of the shelf and one end to the wall through a stud. You can buy them as well for people that live in earth quake zones. This is the best pic I could find. There is a detail picture next to the main picture.
http://www.amazon.com/Quakehold-4162-15-Inch-Furniture-Antique/dp/B000FJP24U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1404168960&sr=8-1&keywords=bookshelf+straps
I'm not sure you can add them up like that, but maybe. The big issue is that it's not that hard to pull one of those out of the wall. They are more for hanging a picture or decoration where the weight is pulling straight down not out.
I had not seen that set up before.
Those straps look like a good way to go.
The anchors shown above, properly installed, will be plenty adequate to stop your shelves from falling forward, especially if the unit is angled/shimmed properly to begin with.
If the unit is flush to the wall, not angled forward and anchored thusly, it would require a huge amount of force to tilt it forward - no way is a child going to be able to do that no matter how much they climb on it.
Caution is always advisable, hysteria is a waste of energy.
Either you don't have kids or you don't care about them. Lots kids have been killed by falling furniture and a fully loaded expedit is way heavier and top heavy than most furniture you see. It's not hysteria, it's called giving a shit. There is a reason the straps say to anchor into a stud. You seriously think that's optional because your some sort of leverage expert? The people that make the shelves and straps know way more about this than you. Sheet rock is not nearly as strong as people might think even with an anchor in it. Not to mention the fact that just going into the stud is much easier and eliminates the need to buy the anchors and install them.
Normally I could care less about bad advice, but yours is going to get a child killed. You don't know what your talking about so just stop. Or you could give us you engineering and physics credentials and let us know how all this is all just a conspiracy to sell L brackets and earthquake straps and ruin our hard earned wall studs.
Very bad advice. I'm sure it's fine with adults not touching it except to pull a book off. Have a kids start pulling on it an climbing it and it won't be so sturdy. It's really not worth the risk. To many kids have died because people though a book shelf seems sturdy enough. Even adults get injured by falling furniture on a regular basis.
LOL
Yeah, it's my life's ambition to see children killed by record shelves.
For the 'record', I probably have more experience building, installing and using record shelves than all of the rest of Soul Strut combined. Five stores, 10 apartments and several storage areas totaling well over 100,000 records capacity going back 20 years or so. My apartment now has a shelving unit I designed and built that holds about 6000 records, it isn't anchored at all and an 800 lb gorilla couldn't get it to budge an inch. That's what you can do when you aren't an hysterical alarmist and use actual principles of construction to build things.
I climb on these all of time, none of them have ever moved an inch. Number of children killed so far stands at zero.
Here are the L brackets that I used. You can use 4 anchors on each side if you want but I don't think it is necessary.
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Everbilt-3-in-Zinc-Plated-Corner-Braces-4-Pack-15307/202033902
And because of this your recommending people not take extra precaution to secure particle board shelves from a store that is know for things being flimsy and falling apart? You should no better than that if you know as much about construction as you claim. I've built sturdy shelves also but we aren't taking about those. Expedits aren't even sturdy 2 min after you assemble them new.
There is a reason all that Ikea stuff comes with wall straps that say screw into a stud. Even they know their stuff is likely to fall over.
OK, there must be a plague of homicidal Expedits killing our nation's children and the media is just covering it up.
My bad.
b/w
The screws that come with expedits are crappy and even screwed into studs aren't any stronger than the wall anchors shown above. Screwing a crappy unit into a stud doesn't make it any stronger.