Our kitchen cabinets are what I’d term to be middle-level quality (Schrock). The shelves are adjustable and held by small pins that sit in the holes on the inside of the unit – four for each shelf. The pegs look like this.
The shelves on the upper cabinets seem to be stable (knock wood), but the shelves in the lower cabinets fall regularly. Somehow one of the pegs comes loose and falls out. After that, it’s not long before the whole shelf comes down.
In each case, there’s only one shelf per cabinet. It sits at the back of the cabinet, and is about half the depth of the full cabinet.
So what can we do to make the shelves more stable? It’s really annoying. Luckily, nothing that sits on the shelves has broken yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
That was my thought as well. Maybe you could compare the pins in the upper cabinet to the pins in the lower cabinet.
Googling this problem produced several solutions. Glue, of course, would work, but it’s certainly something that would be hard to change in the future!
I have the same problem with a corner cabinet where the shelves are quite big. I cut some half-inch battens to the correct length, put a small dab of glue top and bottom and placed them as supports.
We did think of the glue option, but we’d like to be able to adjust the shelf down the road if it would be beneficial.
I guess I was hoping for some easy-to-buy option that would help. I’m envisioning a quarter round piece of wood, with the pegs built in (and the flat side of course to the top). Pop in a slat of wood on each side. and rest the shelf on top. Couldn’t find anything like this, so I suppose it’s not available.
Usually when this happens the pegs are too small for the holes. This could be a problem from the start or over time the drilled holes might have been worn bigger. You could try a hole just above or below if this is the case as those holes might not be worn.
Whatever the reason, glue might not work if the holes are too big. Try a little bit of modeling clay that you push in with the peg to fill up the hole. Or wrap a bit of duck tape around the peg to make it wider.
Agreed. The pins should be relatively difficult to pull out or they will work themselves out.
The other thing to do is check that the shelf is really level. If the shelf isn’t sitting evenly on the pins, then when you change what dishes are on it, it’s going to shift a little bit, and whichever pins it’s shifting against are going to be gently wiggled back and forth over time, working themselves loose. If it’s a little bit out of level, you probably fix it the same way. Put a bit of tape on the underside of some of the corners so that all the pins are holding the weight of it and it doesn’t rock back and forth.
If you look, for example, at the Home Depot website, they have various sorts of shelf pins. Some are just the cylindrical metal dowels, some are the cylindrical dowels with a flat part and some have an L-shaped thing attached.
If the pins are too small, I would buy the correct size rather than trying to jury rig a way to make them fit better.
My shelves have these springy things that plug into a hole above the shelf and hold it down. Those might help. Not sure what they’re called but here’s a picture.
That would be easy enough to create.
Buy the quarter-round, and cut it to length. Then mark the locations and drill holes there on the back of the quarter-round. Then insert pins in there, and put it into the cabinet with the shelf resting on top.
Another option is to get a short piece of board, like a 1 x 2 or 1 x 4 board, which will cover 2 or more of the pin holes in the cabinet.
Then you can drill more holes (and buy more pins) so this is supported by more holes in the cabinet walls – that will make it more stable & secure. (At the cost of losing a bit of width space in the cabinet.)
I’m certainly not implying that this can’t or doesn’t happen, but it really shouldn’t happen.
Wood moves across the direction in which its grain runs. I haven’t personally seen shelves where the grain runs the width of the shelf. It (almost ?) always runs the length of the shelf.
That being the case, seasonal expansion should make the width of a board (ie, its short dimension) marginally greater or lesser but should have very little effect on the length of the board (ie, its long dimension) – therefore, the stability of the shelf board on the shelf pins.
Have you seen it the other way more than occasionally – where somebody built a shelf with the grain running the width of the board ?
On anything but a narrow case, you’d almost certainly have to glue up multiple boards to get that. I’m stuck trying to figure out why somebody would choose that method …
Nope never seen it that I recall. But I’ve seen loose shelves almost everywhere and was simply trying to come up with a reason why. I guess the answer is just not such careful workmanship.
