How do you build a rack?!?!

I made an attempt to build one like last month. I ended up with a really messed up looking piece of melamine.

Anyways, I suck a building stuff, but I am determined to try again. So, how do you get the wood to stay even? And how do you drill in the nails the bottom part? How do you do this alone? Why does the wood keep breaking when I drill?

I know there are so many threads on this, but most assume you have at least some capability or know what a drill is :P

Thanks in advance for any advice. :)

Ok... When drilling into melamine you want to drill holes before you insert screws. It sounds like you attempted to just drill the screws themselves through the melamine.

To keep the whole thing centered and spaced correctly most people just turn the whole thing upside down and build it upside down. If you put the top shelf on the bottom then upside down tub then cardboard then the next shelf and repeat. The sheets of cardboard will insure that you have a proper amount of space between the shelves to allow the tub to slide freely in and out. Drill the holes and screw the screws in as you stack

You can see in this thread that I made how we made everything square. We made up "spacers" that we used to hold up every shelf. This way every shelf was spaced exactly the same.

http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...m-Breeder-Tubs

Here's our racks. Homemade :) under $100 each.

http://img.tapatalk.com/d/12/12/23/berypu6e.jpg

http://img.tapatalk.com/d/12/12/23/equgury8.jpg

I'm going to be making a quick step by step on it soon. It's rather easy.

Mrl, Nice racks but I prefer the professional look of a solid rack. Im kinda picky and OCD about it. Im actually going to be selling some old racks just because they dont match our new ones. lol

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Originally Posted by Rat160

Mrl, Nice racks but I prefer the professional look of a solid rack. Im kinda picky and OCD about it. Im actually going to be selling some old racks just because they dont match our new ones. lol

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I like the closed look as well!

http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h1...-53-48_291.jpg

There are a lot of "how tos" in the DIY here.
A good drill/screw gun, tape measure and table saw are MUST tools as far as I am concerned.

yeah my partner invested a lot of money on his table saw. Movable fences and squaring jigs so now when we cut the melamine, we know its straight and we know its the proper measurement. Just remember: measure twice cut once. lol

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kevinb

I like the closed look as well!

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I completely agree with you all. If money allowed it at the time, I would have built closed. I do like open for ventilation though.

Here is how we built our baby rack :) - same apply to a bigger racks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OaZswQ6p0g

Hope that helps :)