He'd seen it all, then he came up with the Hang-It-Yourself idea

Tim Trunkle was a professional home inspector for 34 years and he’d seen it all; the good, the bad, and the really bad. That was sometimes true of the cabinets and cabinet installations that he saw. He came up with a solution to one of the problems he often saw. 

Now, he sells that cabinet installation solution online full time from his business in South Carolina. His idea? The EazyHang.

“At about the 18-year mark in my home inspection career, I was tired of seeing the same issues with cabinet backs separating from the rest of the cabinets, usually due to improper installation, so I decided to make an easy repair system to address this issue,” he said. “After designing a repair product, I thought to myself, ‘Why am I just fixing the symptom and not addressing the problem?’"

According to Trunkle, all European cabinets are installed with hanging systems that are secured using the side walls of the cabinets whereas domestic style cabinets all attach through the rear wall. 

easy hang kit
The  EazyHang kit.

Trunkle said that there were several patents on similar hanging systems, but they were all designed so that you had to customize cabinets to be able to utilize the various systems. “This prompted me to design and make a prototype for a universal fit hanging system.”

The prototype system was used on a cabinet that he hung in his garage for 3 years. “I moved from that house to another house and brought my cabinet and prototype with me to a new garage and hung it again thinking to myself, ‘I really should market this system because it works.’"

Three simple steps

Finally, after eight years of having a prototype hanging in a garage, he filed for a patent in 2014 and was awarded a utility patent in 2017.  In January 2019, Trunkle formed EazyHang and by November 2019, he launched a website to sell his universal fit cabinet hanging system, Hang-It-Yourself.

Three simple steps, A- Attach the rail to the wall, B- Mount the bracket on the back of a cabinet and C-Hang the cabinet on the rail
Three simple installation steps. A: Attach the rail to the wall.

“I had so many naysayers telling me that nobody would buy the system and that there were already products available, but there weren't and still aren't,” Trunkle said. “In less than a year and a half I had shipped systems to all 50 states including several to Canada.”

Both DIYers and professional cabinet installers purchased the product and were “puzzled by the fact that such a product has not been available until now …,” he said. “It is the first real new way to install wall cabinets in over 60 years.”

The system will make it easy to install framed, frameless, pre-assembled or Ready-To-Assemble (RTA) cabinets on an American style wall rail system without any design modifications to the cabinets. 

Three simple steps, A- Attach the rail to the wall, B- Mount the bracket on the back of a cabinet and C-Hang the cabinet on the rail
B: Mount the bracket on the back of a cabinet.

According to Trunkle, installers no longer have to measure, calculate, re-measure and then pre-drill each wall cabinet for stud alignment. Nor do they have to support a cabinet with a wall cleat or a second pair of hands while leveling and securing the cabinet in place. 

He said that the sturdy wall rail, which is the backbone of the concept, ensures a level cabinet installation and provides the flexibility of being able to hang and adjust all the wall cabinets prior to final attachment. The cabinet mounting bracket design provides uniform vertical alignment and allows the typically cumbersome job of cabinet attachment to be done with picture hanging ease. 

C-Hang the cabinet on the rail.
C: Hang the cabinet on the rail

Trunkle further expounded on the strength of the hanging system by detailing that the T-nut fasteners that secure the brackets to the cabinets capture over twice the surface area of a typical mounting screw. The brackets distribute the load more evenly along the cabinet’s rear wall, rather than just at a wall stud. With the cabinets fully suspended on the wall rail, the faces can easily be aligned and attached to one another.

Trunkle has a base cabinet system coming out in early 2023 that will incorporate a cabinet bracket/rail that will align and support the base cabinet as well as a countertop. 
“What is truly unique is that it will place half the load onto the wall rather than all of it being supported by the floor,” he said. 
 

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About the author
Larry Adams | Editor

Larry Adams is a Chicago-based writer and editor who writes about how things get done. A former wire service and community newspaper reporter, Larry is an award-winning writer with more than three decades of experience. In addition to writing about woodworking, he has covered science, metrology, metalworking, industrial design, quality control, imaging, Swiss and micromanufacturing . He was previously a Tabbie Award winner for his coverage of nano-based coatings technology for the automotive industry. Larry volunteers for the historic preservation group, the Kalo Foundation/Ianelli Studios, and the science-based group, Chicago Council on Science and Technology (C2ST).