Hanging rack for cordless power tools and charging station

[LCHIEN]

I'm thinking about making a hangar for the 4-5 cordless tools I usually use in the shop and perhaps a charging station.

Anyone have any good designs, comments about usability that they have encountered, experiences?

One example from the internet. Seems un-necessarily complex to me. Why does it need the separators? to keep the tools from twisting? If stored up high and out of the way it will be hard to see the lights on the charger which are aimed at the ceiling. And even to put the batteries into the charger,

Should you make the bays to store tools with battery attached or with the battery removed?
All my tools share the same battery packs but I have them in two different height/capacities. I'm thinking of a shelf for loose batteries (instead of attached as in the example), to save some vertical height. Does that make sense? Or not?
Tilting the charger so that you can see the lights? Or Charger vertically mounted on a backboard (it has keyhole slots) so you can see the lights; the batteries would then plug in horizontally but there's enough friction to keep them in.

Some plans have the motor on top, some have the tool hang by the battery base. This one shows them hanging both ways. Since my tools all share the same battery and therefore battery base design I'm thinking hang by the base. Esp. since one is a right angle slim drill that can't hang from the motor side.



More examples attached

[leehljp]

Loring I am somewhat jealous of your setup. My shop is in the back yard. And I am constantly using the drill and impact driver and other tools such as the 18V hot melt glue gun, soldering iron, lights of Ryobi around the house or helping others, or using my tools at my part time ministry work. No way to "clean up" each day and pull everything out the next day etc.

I am strongly thinking about getting the 6 bank Ryobi 18V charger. to keep all mine charged.

That is ideal for an in house or basement/garage storage where the work is within a confined area. I am jealous of this setup. Looks great!

OH, I have 3 individual chargers for Ryobi, one for Hitachi, one for Dewalt. I placed mine on the back wall of my shop initially and they are still there, I have to walk by and around my work bench to get to it. Big Mistake. It is still there but since I do most work on the bench or outside or in the house, I should have put it on the front wall near the door. However, I had already take the front wall space and added tool hangers for specific corded tools. I just need the time to re-arrange my tool set-up.

Locate your tool storage and charging station in the most convenient and easiest place to access it, not at the back of the shop or in a corner because it is open. Consider it like one would with a coat rack by the door in a freezing state.

[LCHIEN]

I haven't made one yet!

Just pictures from the internet.

My biggest issue may be that I can't find space on the shop wall for one.

[dbhost]

I can't contribute much to this as my only cordless tools are 2x ultra cheap Drill Master 18v drills / lights / chargers. And honestly the Drill master battery / charger does not EVER get left unsupervised while charging as it, and the battery tend to get much warmer than I am comfortable with, but they all do it so I figure that is just hte way they work... I simply hang the tool from pegs on the pegboard on my clamshell cabinets.

[Jim Frye]

Welcome to the bat cave. The chargers are on a pegboard shelf farther down the wall.

[Jim Frye]

Same thing happens with Chrome as the browser on the iPad. No first pic if not signed in. Both pics if signed in.

[twistsol]

I'll have a look and see what I can find, but I really hate issues like these because they are usually not reproducible and impossible to resolve.

Update: It looks like the first picture was never uploaded so it is being read from your ipad in the cases where you are seeing it. It was assigned an attachment id of 27457, and the code on the server is trying to read it, but that file doesn't exist on the server. I can only see the second picture whether logged in, logged out, or logged in to my administrator account.

[Jim Frye]

Thanks for looking into this. I don't think it's limited to the iPad. I see the same thing on a PC.I think something went amiss during the first pic. submission and when I restored the failed post, a link somewhere in the database was broken. Not a big issue.

[twistsol]

Here is my completely lame solution that required no effort other than spending money. I've thought about building one of the charging stations shown in the OP, but time is not on my side and I have a solution for now.

Steel pegboard from HD and some drill cradles from Diamond Life Gear and chargers sitting on the bench behind the miter saw fence.

[LCHIEN]

OK, well I sorted out what I wanted in a drill holder.

• Compact and space efficient.
• Space for 5 or 6 tools
• Fit in existing remaining space on the wall a little wider than a pair of studs on the unfinished wall
• place for the chargers I have; 2 of them, and with the controls and indicators facing out where I could see them, not up at the ceiling where you can't see them
• A little space for batteries and bits
• a space for my air quality monitor
• A power strip for the stuff
• Not too complicated

So all those ideas from the internet seemed really complex for what it was and the chargers all would sit on their bottoms and point up.
So I got the idea, why not a shelf for hanging the tools, and a vertical board with the chargers mounted?

This is what I came up with using commercially made adjustable shelf standards and a pair of 12" shelf brackets. and a few pieces of plywood. It took a fair amount of drilling, cutting, sanding and routing for those darn slots. I put two shallow kerf cuts in the bottom of the shelf so that they would sit over the shelf brackets and not slide or wobble. They should be 16" apart (stud distance) but I measured after installing the standards and the centers were as I marked on my drawing - about 3/16 off.



:

Here's my Dylos air quality tester, and a line power monitor... I like to see the 120 V is stable. Its always between 121 and 123.
The white thing in the upper right of the pictures plugged into the wall is a night Light/emergency lighting in case for some reason power is lost in the shop I can find my way out. It get very dark at night with the only lights being the overhead ones.

Any questions?

[LCHIEN]

I turned on the air filter after these pictures, because I did some sanding and vacuuming just before. The 1 um particle count went from 200 to about 75-80 after an hour.

[dbhost]

Looks good. I am still seriously wishing I had sprung for a Dylos meter years ago. Very vaulable information, but still a pricey upgrade I am hard pressed to afford...

I digress though...

Very nice, compact, multi functional storage. Exactly the sorts of projects we all need for maximum shop function.

[LCHIEN]

Looks good. I am still seriously wishing I had sprung for a Dylos meter years ago. Very vaulable information, but still a pricey upgrade I am hard pressed to afford...

I digress though...

Very nice, compact, multi functional storage. Exactly the sorts of projects we all need for maximum shop function.

i picked up the Dylos on eBay after having passed the time we had a group purchase here.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/19477267554...8AAOSwMQhh8iJh

Several for sale. The one linked above for $100, BIN.

[leehljp]

I ordered one of these last week and charged all of my batteries over the weekend. Wow I like it. No bunch of chargers and cords sitting around. I am not well organized and this helps a bunch!

https://www.homedepot.com/p/RYOBI-ON...-206892719-_-N
There was a sale with it that included a 2Ah battery for cheaper than the regular price of the charger itself. That sale is now over, I think.

I also found I had two more Ryobi batteries than I thought I had. My 4Ah battery that quite showing its charge level - started working correctly today.

[twistsol]

That is sweet and should go a long way to tidying things up. Unfortunately I was too stupid to standardize on a single battery type so I have DeWalt 18 and 20 volt, Ryobi 18 and 40 volt, Festool 18 volt and Ridgid 18 volt. And to make things even sillier, my Dewalt drywall gun is 20v and my cutout tool is 18v so I have to bring both chargers if I'm doing drywall.

[LCHIEN]

The only thing I wanted to do that I could not do was to fasten the vertical board with the chargers to the shelf standards, making the board easily removable and height adjustable.

I looked and I could not find or figure out an easy way to make a vertical board mount to the shelf standards slots with the hooks that the shelf brackets have.

So its is just screwed to the studs. Had to cut out a corner to miss the outlet mounted there.