Wood shelves for production van?

F

firehawk

Veteran
Trying to configure my Ford Transit medium roof cargo van and looking at shelving options.
The expensive metal shelves are noisy. ABS shelves are super expensive.
So I am considering making wood shelves and then painting them, staining them, and/or covering them with a bedliner type coating or tough carpet.
Wood is said to be less noisy and gives me more flexibility in configuration/modification.

The van will be used mostly for corporate and event jobs. So I'd be hauling cases with cameras, lights, stands etc.

It will be quite some time before I have garage parking for it, and it sometimes gets 0 degrees F in winter and 100-112 degrees F in summer.

Thoughts?
 
"Wood is said to be less noisy and gives me more flexibility in configuration/modification." Yes, wood is a great option. Strong and lightweight, although it may add some bulk the other options don't. There is a gray carpet type product used in the industry for surfaces that is popular. It is used on carts and dollys. I'll try to find it.

Put a little bit of a lip edge on the shelves to keep things in place or use cargo netting.

If you don't have the saws to cut up materials and the local lumber company charge $5 for each cut, buy what you need and bring it to a local carpenter or cabinet maker. They will make all the cuts for a few bucks.
 
To heck with hiring a carpenter... circular saws with plywood blades are ridiculously cheap, and you can make straight cuts easily using a board and a couple furniture clamps. Matthews even sells furniture clamps with grip spud attachments that happen to do wonderful double duty on the job.

Where possible, make your attachments with bolts through the wood, as opposed to screws or nails into the wood. This makes it possible to tighten the joints back up after they loosen through movement.

In short, yes, wood is good.
 
Thank you all very much.
And thanks Hectorxd for the photos. I've been trying to decide on how to store the C stands and light stands.
 
My thoughts having done this numerous times..... Attachment points: Make sure your shelving, whether wood or metal, is secured in place properly. Once you add cases full of gear there is quite a bit of weight which can shift if not anchored properly. I used metal shelving for the majority of my Sprinter van, which is held in place via ratchet straps which attach to D-Rings inserted into E-Track which I mounted to the interior of the van walls. Flexibility: Things change. You might consider making your shelving heights changeable rather than fixed to accommodate different size cases in the future. One of the benefits of using the heavy duty metal shelves I chose.
 
I don't have a van, it's an F-250 with 6 3/4' bed and a shell. I had a raised floor(high enough for Pelican gun cases to slide under) and side shelf units built for me. It's three pieces(raised floor and mirrored side shelves) that fit together and then screwed together. We built it from 3/4" plywood that was then coated with spray-in bed liner. The leading edge of the raised floor has taken a lot of abuse over the last five years, but otherwise it's still holding up well and looks the same as it did when we built it. Except for the front of the raised floor.
 
Here are some old cell phone pics from early '13 when we were finishing the build and one with the truck while I was loading it for an out of town 12 day shoot right after it was finished.

Under the raised floor, I can carry two Pelican 1750 gun cases loaded front-to-back and a smaller gun case with smaller light stands side-to-side, with a "spare" tripod at the very back. There's room on the floor of the bed on each side for shot and sand bags, with the shelves carrying my primary tripod, loose stands for quick access, frames and other assorted grip. We added LED strip lighting on the "ceiling" and inside of some of the shelves that's wired to come on whenever the back is open. I've also recently added LEDs to the inside of the back hatch to provide additional lighting on the tailgate surface.

Shelves Empty.jpg

Shelves Full.jpg
 
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