Problem 1: my ammo is mostly stacked on the floor in little plastic containers. This causes...
Problem 2: to get at anything I have to unstack the containers to access the one I need and ...
Problem 3: my old house has a limited number of closets and they are all under the steeply pitched roof so all require a little bit of hunching to get into
Solution: build a dedicated ammunition shelf into a different closet, where nothing will be stacked.
With a little browsing I found this shelf project over on With A Bullet, completed in 2011 and shamelessly stole all his ideas, plus one of the suggestions in the comments.
Here are the results, followed by a couple comments.
Ladders:
Framed (two by four across the bottom is just to stabilize while I moved it around and came off before I put it into the closet)
Shelved with sanded maple. The 2 x 2s were a suggestion in the comments on the original post to increase shear load. There is no way that this shelf needs increased shear load, but it looks a lot cleaner with the gaps filled. Mine is also probably overbuilt compared to the original overbuilt version because my space only allows for three wide cans versus his four.
This was basically the finished product except that it was four inches to long to go through the closet door and swing into position. I had to take the small end apart, cut off four inches, then reassemble.
Here it is mostly loaded although I'm still working through some miscellaneous calibers plus cleaning supplies and leftover junk. I'm also planning on printing nice labels instead of sticky notes which will fall off.
I'm pretty pleased. The safe is off to the right and once I get all the miscellaneous junk sorted this will have freed up a larger closet (I don't have many) in the master bedroom. This is probably the best woodworking project I've ever done (I'm not much of a woodworker) but followed the directions from With a Bullet pretty closely and other than the door issue came out nice.
