Making a Steel Story Bookcase

I made a bookcase.

I have an office that I share with my girlfriend Lovisa, she has her desk diagonal to a corner of the room.

We also have a lot of books and have bookcases which are doubled up. I also recently learned to weld and wanted to reinforce and hone my skills by making something.

So I designed and built a story bookcase to fit in the corner. I wanted a nice raw steel look. I wanted it to be free standing.

Since it is a corner I wanted to have the support be directly in the corner and the shelves to extend along the walls so we get a triangular shape, I wanted it symmetric leading to isosceles triangles.

I wanted it to be strong enough to be able to hold the full height of the shelves full of magazine sized books and for it to be stable with weight distributed anywhere on the shelves. To match the style and provide stability I used a thicker piece of metal (0.188 inches) for the base in the shape of an isosceles triangle as well the base is 18 inches to a side and the shelves were 14 inches to a side. There are 5 shelves spaced 14.5 inches apart starting at 21 inches from the base. I used 0.104 inch sheet metal for each shelf. The angle bracket is 1.5x1.5x0.188.

On the base I added triangular supports along the edges of the sheet and the angle bracket X inches in length. Below each shelf there is a 3 inch triangular support extending along each for a total of about 4.5 inches of support along each edge (less the 0.188 width of the angle bracket). The maximum load is far less than what I would need to be concerned about the angle bracket Euler bucking for and on top of that there is extra rigidity added by the triangular supports.

The metal for the materials cost 117.66 with tax from metals supermarket. I had leftovers, just the pieces I used could be had for about 100\$.

Overall I am happy with how it turned out!

Things that could be improved. - I should have had a slight backwards bend to the base to compensate for the forward bend of the books as is we had to put some stuff below the foot of the base away from the wall as the welds ended up having a forward bent to start with and I wanted the support against the corner. - The supports are over engineered they could be smaller but I figured better safe than sorry. They could be smaller by doing scalene triangles extending out, having a smaller safety factor. Putting the supports above the shelves would have also made them more invisible since they would tend to be obstructed by the books on the shelves adding to the effect. - I welded the bottom supports before the angle bracket, they turned out out of place due to being too far away from the corner I should have just welded the angle bracket first. - I wanted to keep the corners share for the aesthetic but in retrospect this is not worth the trouble of them stabbing things when moving it around. A similar logic holds for keeping the top over the top shelf, it is aesthetic but unwieldy.