J.N. Taylor and Co.: Ikea Ribba Magnetic Key Holder + Color Coded Keys By: JimmyY

Monday, June 9, 2014

Ikea Ribba Magnetic Key Holder + Color Coded Keys By: JimmyY

Materials: RIBBA picture ledge

This hack is kind of 2 in 1…the first and most important one is taking an Ikea Ribba Picture Ledge and some rare earth magnets and turning it into a magnetic key holder & shelf for your small items such as wallet, phone, moustache wax, etc. The 2nd hack involves colour coding your keys to tell them apart. Total cost for materials was around $50.00 and some of my girlfriend’s nail polish.

Both are pretty quick and simple…

Choose how many magnets you want underneath your Ribba Picture Ledge, in this case I chose 6 and purchased these from a local electronic parts distributor. Make sure they are rare earth magnets as these have great lift and strength for their size, I used 0.875″ diameter x 0.125″ thick magnets.

Equally space the placement of the magnets using tape, I had the outer (2) magnets 3.25″ in from either end to the center, and (4) inner magnets 3″ apart center to center. All were 1.75″ in from the front edge of the Ribba to the center of the magnets.

Using a hot glue gun (or I’m sure contact cement would also work), place a fair amount of glue onto one side of the first magnet and press it into place. Complete this for all of them.

Aside from mounting to the wall, thats it! For mounting to the wall I wanted to use drywall anchors to keep the connection extra strong. As I didn’t want to hit any studs, I downloaded a free iPhone stud finder app. Beauty.

For the keys, I masked off the bottom area so that I would have a nice clean line when finished and then painted the different keys with different colors of my girlfriend’s nail polish. I put on 3 coats and voila, all done. Last step here was to group similar keys on to the same key ring (i.e. storage room key + storage locker key, bike room key + bike lock keys).

I did some research on whether the rare earth magnets would affect my car and condo key fobs and it looks like this is not an issue.

I also checked to see if this would affect my iPhone, all I could come up with is that it may affect the calibration of the compass app. I never use this app so I’m not concerned about it all at, also, apparently you can recalibrate it.

Lastly, I am told that the magnets may or may not affect credit cards that would be in your wallet sitting on top of the rack. I haven’t had any issue so far.