The magnetic knife rack is a brilliant invention. In addition to keeping knives sharper and cleaner than its predecessor the large-wooden-block knife rack, it also is a small, and easily implementable step towards my dream kitchen (which in case you were wondering, looks something like a cross between Julia Child’s kitchen, with her ever-so-functional peg boards, and the classic Ikea kitchen, with stainless steel everything, and the metal bar on the wall that you can hook things over or hang things on)–but I digress.

The fatal design flaw with the magnetic knife rack is how one goes about attatching it to a wall. This is less of an issue of you own your house/condo, but for us renters, it gets difficult. Clearly drilling through the tile backsplash above the counter was not an option (why on earth does everyone put tile there anyways?), and drilling through the wood cabinetry was, but seeing as its not our cabinetry, I felt it was kind of a jerky move. Anyways, this was clearly a job for google.

Query: “How to put up magnetic knife rack without drilling through tile”
Answer: (Besides several dangerous but unhelpful ads for cool culinary stuff): “Two-sided tape”

Really? Thats the best we can come up with? I find it hard to believe that two-sided tape would actually hold a 1′ long strip of metal…let alone all the knives. And then there’s the issue of pulling the knives off the rack without pulling the rack off the wall. And finally, if you’ve ever tried to work with two-sided tape, you know it makes everything it touches permanently sticky. Google Fail.

Now this is the part where the “hacking” starts. Normal people would conclude one of two things:
1) I guess I’ll go buy a large wooden block that takes up valuable counter space and dulls my knives.
or
2) Screw it (no pun intended), I’m drilling into the tile/cabinetry anyways.

Hackers are not normal people. When part (most, really) of your job is to build things using parts that others before you assembled and usually failed to document, you have few if any qualms about using things in a way that was perhaps not their intended purpose. For most of us though, rather than being a skill we learned on the job, this resourcefulness is an innate quality, for which we finally found a use (besides annoying our S.O.’s). And you can’t turn it off when you leave the office. This has lead to skates being repaired with zip-ties, rusted out wheel-wells being covered with duct-tape, “drapes” (actually bedsheets) being hung with self-adhesive hooks, string and paper-clips etc. I think its that “just make it work” attitude.

And so, that was how I found myself wandering around the kitchen, knife in one hand rack in the other, placing the rack on various surfaces to see if it could possibly fit there. The (accidental) stroke of genius came when I held the rack up against the side of our metal Seville shelf from Costco, and realized that the *back* of the knife rack was magnetic too, and was now stuck, quite securely to the metal shelf!

Unfortunately, knives are made of metal too, and while the magnets in the knife rack were strong enough to hold the shelf in place under normal conditions, they were not quite strong enough to keep it there when a metal knife was being pulled off the rack.
And so a strip of wood found under the sink, and zip-ties (second only to duct tape on the quick-fix-for-everything scale) were employed to restrain it. Success. Elegant? No. Functional? Very much. A hack? Totally–but a damn sight better than two-sided tape.

I realize this is not terribly exciting to most people. But I thought I owed it to the internet at large to offer a better solution to the magnetic knife rack dilemma than two-sided tape. So there.