Strength displacement

A few days before the 26th of November, my wife's clothes bar in our walk-in closet fell down.

It had collapsed once before, maybe half a year or a year ago, when some of the screw heads pulled through the holes in the inexpensive brackets that hold up the clothes bar.

What I did at that point was place a washer between the screw heads and the bracket, to prevent them from pulling through in the future. I did this for the bracket that failed, as well as the other three (preventatively).


This time around, it seems that the structural failure was not due to the screws. Rather, the entire chunk of wood had pulled loose from the underside of the closet shelf!

In this picture, you can see the piece of wood that pulled loose. Note that the bracket is still firmly attached!

It turns out that the strips of wood were held on by a single line of glue, plus two small nails driven in at a slight angle. Wow! No wonder they failed!

This time, I repaired and reinforced it by scraping off the old glue, re-gluing it with a full smear of glue (rather than a single narrow line), and using two bolts (with washers!) though the shelf.

We'll see what fails next...


--GG