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Suppport by diagonally placed sticks
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All the stuff we gather in our lives need to be stored, often on shelves. Demotech itself has an enormous mass of small and larger things that has to put away, but have to be within easy reach on the other hand. Such as our book keeping and our kitchen stuff.
Though we were in dire need of them, in some cases to make shelves proved difficult;
Our walls were unreliable to attach something to. They were too soft, or too uneven.
To use the floor to stack the shelves on, was unpractical as well. It was not flat, but the real problem: it was not available, as needed for other purposes.
Neither offered the ceiling an easy attachment. The beams for the roof were strong enough, but the space between them did seldom match the lengths of the shelves.
Above conditions also occur in the millions of dwellings in shanty towns, where only the roof beams offer some hold and walls are fully unreliable to fasten anything to. Making this a problem worthwhile to be solved.
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A frame atteched to
the roof beams
now take the load
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The way out was to construct a base structure from the ceiling and go from there. Even then we had a long way to go and experimented over the years to find a method, where shelves could be prepared as modular units, to be interconnected by frames, hanging from this base structure attached at the ceiling.
A problem of stability had to be solved. What hangs down can sway. Shelves with stuff stored on them should not sway. We lined out the spacers between the shelves in a way they all were pulled out of the middle and wanted to sway back, specially when some load was put on the shelves.
For this reason all shelves want to sway back against the wall, press themselves against the wall, causing this hanging construction to remain fixed in one position.
Still there was an instability of the shelves to overcome. The lower shelves had the tendency to turn backward over in conditions of load. Our solution for it did not work very well. (first picture). This solution consisted out of sticks diagonally positioned, guiding the load from the front to the wall. It was a messy set up.
What turns out to works better is to extend the primary frame attached to the ceiling. Now it reaches from one beam to the other, whether these beams run even to the wall or cross wise (lower picture). The trick of the shelves, each swaying back into a stable position, now works well at last.
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