Custom Steel Floating Shelf

Floating shelves can be a bit of a mindbender to lay eyes on, when you don’t know what you’re looking at. You’re compelled to think “how did they do that?” For me, this thought of “how did they do that?” turned into “how would I do that?” when a client of mine asked for a set of welded steel shelves to run across about 16 feet of wall in his salon in Minneapolis, with all 16 feet having the “floating” effect.

For the actual show-piece shelf material, my customer requested hot roll sheet metal, with a simple 90 degree bend, formed in a brake press. This sort of metal has a great looking ombre effect that cleanly provides a nice industrial aesthetic.

I’m glad to say that there’s a fair wealth of knowledge available for design approaches to floating shelves. Of the designs that are put to work, a two part system, where a steel strip is leveled and mounted on the wall, followed by the shelf itself, which bolts on to the first steel strip. This is a simple and strong design that I was able to put to work in this particular project with minimal tweaking - tweaking that was primarily a single decision: how much overkill is too much overkill?

Normally, with my designs, my general aim is for them to be able to survive a collapse of the building they’re installed in/on. This design was no different. There is a 3/4x7” section of 11 gauge tube welded every 13 inches, plus 7 1/2” bolts nested in each gap. When it comes to install day, we will be lag bolting into each available stud. Factoring about 40 pounds of “hold” available per stud, and a total shelf weight of 40 pounds, each of these shelves should be able to support roughly 200 pounds.

From 3d design to a physical form, it was a smooth process.

The skeleton is only 2” tall - this is the main reason for so much additional support being necessary. Without all the bolts and horizontal support, the shelf would most likely twist and wind up being a complete eyesore after installation. With this first, 8 foot, steel skeleton complete, I was able to use it as a template for the next one, to perfectly bookmatch them.

Have you ever figured out a brain teaser? The twisted nails, or the ring stuck on the chain? After you solve it once, it becomes extremely easy to solve again…almost difficult to not solve. This 2nd steel shelf was precisely that - it took half the time as the first one, and only 1/4 of the cursing. The photo below is the final one I got before taking the shelves to powder coat. They’ll be buttoned up by the end of this week, and hopefully installed at the end of next week. I will post a follow-up with lots of photos after install. For the moment, thank you for reading. I look forward to sharing more soon!