Angled Shelves for Dummies

Angled (ladder) shelves

Freelancers who wrote for Demand Media Studios in its heyday as a content farm were required to provide a biography, in about thirty words, that summarized their writing expertise and/or educational background. Since there was no fact-checking of these biographies, heaven only knows how many (or how few) of them were based in reality. Take, for instance, one Ryan Menezes, who claimed to be a member of Mensa. You sure can't tell it by looking at his HomeSteady.com post "How to Determine the Angle for Braces of a Shelf," though...

Ryan leveraged both that high IQ and his journalism degrees for this one, beginning with the vapid statement that

"Without braces to help prop it up, a shelf may buckle from the weight of the items on it. This warps the wood over time. With heavier items, the shelf may crack or break from the wall."

Ummm, yeah – way to sell it, Ryan! But wait a minute: aren't shelves generally perpendicular to a wall? and doesn't "perpendicular" suggest that the braces need incorporate a 90-degree angle? Sure it does... but Ryan forged ahead, anyway:

"If you don't know the angle that the shelf makes with the wall, you can calculate it using trigonometry."

Believe it or not, Menezes then launched into a 184-word discussion of how to determine the tilt of a shelf with a carpenter's level, a tape measure, and some basic trigonometry; including the inane statement that

"If the [carpenter's] level touched the front of the shelf, the brace must be less than 90 degrees..."

...which, given Ryan's massive IQ, he should have recognized as ambiguous. But all that pales alongside the assumption that someone is attempting to measure the angle between an existing shelf and a wall, which – according to all our carpentry types – is pure-D stupid.
In reality, however, it's pretty obvious (at least to anyone who's done any carpentry) that the OQ wanted to know how to calculate the angle between an upright and a shelf in some sort of shelves he was building, shelves with slanted legs like the ladder systems pictured above. Despite his alleged intellectual prowess Menezes couldn't figure that out, making Ryan just another ordinary Dumbass of the Day.

copyright © 2017-2023 scmrak

DDIY - CARPENTRY