I’ve got a lot of pegboard on the walls in my basement lair to hang tools on:

Pegboard is quick and easy to put up and you can crowd as many tools onto a panel as you can buy hangers for but, as just about everybody knows, the little wire hangers have a tendency, one might even say a proclivity for unhooking themselves and going dancing across the floor, ending up in the most inaccessible corner of the room, almost as if they’re smart enough to go looking for it. I found about a dozen of them up against the baseboards and behind cabinets while I was sweeping and vacuuming and moving stuff around today.

So I took an idea from a web site I visit quite a lot and replaced the four by four sheet of pegboard that hung on one wall of my work shop with a four by two sheet of plywood. I planned to move an old walnut table against that wall to use as a work bench and wanted most of my tools in easy reach. The biggest piece of plywood I had on hand was a two by four sheet of three-eighths inch plywood that I was using as an outfeed table for a table saw. I was thinking about shortening it up because it takes up too much room and it’s a clutter magnet. I’ve got smaller pieces of plywood, so I’ll use those to make an outfeed table instead.

I screwed three pieces of two-by-two furring strips across the wall studs to make the plywood as solid as possible. Another thing I didn’t like about the pegboard was that it vibrated like a drum head whenever I picked a tool out of one of the hangers, making it even more likely that the wire hangers would pop out and go hiding somewhere on the floor of the shop.

Then I dug into my scrap wood collection and started making hangers for the tools. Most were very simple, like the ten-inch end of a two by four wall stud that I drilled holes through and used to hang screwdrivers. Two rows of holes one inch apart gave me a lot of room to store screwdrivers. A very good thing. I’ve got a lot of screwdrivers.

Another scrap of wall stud drilled full of holes gave me a place to park the spade bits that I had the hardest time laying my hands on up until now, and it’s still got room for me to drill more holes in it, if and when I need to park more bits. I know I’ve got more bits around here somewhere.

Other hangers took a bit of imagination, like the one I made for the hand brace I bought at a garage sale. I don’t use it much for drilling out holes, but I use it all the time to drive screws so I want it in arm’s reach of whatever I might be working on at the bench. Really, I screw things together with a brace more often than a screwdriver or a driving bit in an electric drill. It’s easier than using a screwdriver and I don’t split wood as often as I do with an electric drill because I get a better feel for when the screw has gone as far as it can. As if that wasn’t enough, the brace I have is fitted with a reversible ratchet, letting me drive screws or back them out even in very tight spaces. I’d hate to have to drive a lot of screws without it, and I typically screw together most of my work. Probably too much.

The hanger for the hammers was probably the hardest to figure out, but you’ve got to have hammers. It’s not a work bench without hammers. The trouble I had was that my hammers hung cockeyed from the first hanger I made. I don’t know why. I laid them out on the bench, lined up the pegs I used to hang them from and carefully traced around them to drill the holes, so it should have worked swimmingly, but when I finished it and hung the hammers, they were crooked. Not that it was crucial for them to hang straight. I mean, so long as they hung there instead of, say, falling off and hitting me in the head, it shouldn’t have made a difference, but I was so careful! They should have been straight! So I started over. I did pretty much the same thing the second time as I did the first time, because I didn’t see what was wrong with that, and it worked fine. The hammers are straight now. I don’t know why, but they are.

Probably the easiest hanger to make, as well as the most useful, was the one for the pliers. It actually holds my pliers, wire cutters, and channel lock wrenches. It’s just a narrow scrap of plywood screwed to a couple of posts. The pliers straddle the plywood the way a bike rider’s legs straddle the frame of a bicycle. Works way better than any of the wire hangers I could find for pegboard. They pissed me off no end because they always snagged on the plastic handles of the pliers, sending the hanger and most of the other pliers flying.

The only hanger I didn’t have to make was the shelf bracket I used to hang tape measures. Every tape measure has a metal clip on one side so you can hang it from your belt. I used to hang them from a T-square, but the obvious problem with that is, if I need the T-square then I have to take all the measuring tapes off it first. Well, a shelf bracket is a thin, hardened strip of metal, same as a T-square, and I just happened to have some extra shelf brackets, so I screwed a couple to the wall and voila! All my tape measures have a home now. I’ve got a lot of tape measures, too.