About
About Rail & Rafter
A publication about where things go in a garage. Written by one person, funded by affiliate commission, and honest about both.
What this is
Rail & Rafter is about the specific problem of where things go in a garage. Not the products in the abstract — the pile in front of you, and which system it belongs on.
Every other site in this category organizes itself by product: racks here, shelving there, cabinets on the left. That is a sensible way to run a catalog and a poor way to help somebody standing in a cluttered garage, because the question you are actually asking is not "which rack has the best specs" but "what do I do about the bikes?"
So the site is built on two crossing axes. Five product hubs — overhead, shelving, walls, cabinets, bins — and one organized by the mess itself, which is the part that actually helps: the mess.
Who writes it
Scooter M. writes everything here. An enthusiast — somebody genuinely interested in this, rather than somebody with a credential in it.
What that means in practice, stated plainly so you can judge it: I read the manufacturers' manuals and spec sheets, I compile the published specifications into tables nobody else has bothered to build, I run the clearance and load arithmetic and show the working, and I track what things actually cost. No lab coat.
What I do not do
I do not test these products. I have not hung a rack from a ceiling for this site, I do not own the products I write about, and there is no test lab behind any of it.
I also hold no certifications, licenses or degrees relevant to this — not as an engineer, not as a contractor, not as anything else. Nothing on this site implies otherwise, and if you ever find something that does, tell me and I will fix it.
The reasonable question that raises is why any of this is worth reading, and the honest answer is in the work rather than the credential. The complete IRC joist span matrix on how much weight a garage ceiling holds — 2x4 through 2x10, four spacings, both design load cases — is a genuinely useful reference that you can check against the code yourself. The one competitor doing that arithmetic publishes 2x8 only. That is a real contribution and it required no lab.
The full method, including the criteria every pick is scored against, is on how we pick.
How it is funded
Affiliate commission on qualifying purchases made through links here, at no cost to you. That is the whole model: no sponsored placements, no paid rankings, no free products accepted.
Commission does not decide what ranks first. Where a cheaper option is the better buy, that is the one that goes at the top — and every pick carries an explicit reason you might want to skip it, which is not a thing a site optimizing purely for commission would publish. Full statement on the affiliate disclosure.
How new this is
New. Rail & Rafter is a new, independently operated publication. We have no trading history to claim and do not claim one. There is no founding story, no "since 20XX", no team photo and no premises, because there is nothing there to photograph.
Right now the site is 44 articles across six sections, all of them written from published manufacturer documentation and published code tables, with the sources listed at the foot of each page.
Who publishes it
Rail & Rafter is published by Slate Mill Group.
Get in touch
If something here is wrong, tell me and I will check the source — corrections are marked and the page's visible date is updated when they happen. If there is a pile in your garage this site does not have a page for, that is genuinely useful to know.
info@railandrafter.com, or the form on the contact page.