The shelves

I took another plank from my stash and marked off 42cm long pieces, with a target length of 40cm in mind. The board was ever so slightly twisted, but chopping it in smaller pieces reduced the twist significantly.

I placed the board on my miter saw station – my shooting board – and chopped off the pieces. Yes, I DO have a miter saw. But I don’t have room for it in my shop. Besides, I’ve become rather good with a hand saw and it does not take much time to do. And it saves me from manhandling a long piece of wood around the shop. Just drop the shooting board down and start sawing.

I jointed one edge and shot the ends. There was some ares with hints of sap wood, so I ripped the pieces down slightly, then jointed the last edge so that I was left with two pieces of 6S shelf blanks.

This board was 30mm in thickness, way more than needed. The panel ended up at 20mm, so I decided to make the shelves equal to that. I marked the line with my marking gauge and drew the line with a pencil so that I could see it better. I’m not 20 anymore…..

A quick trip over to the band saw – my favourite thicknesser! In stead of making chip offerings to the dust collector bin demons, I get useable materials!

Within minutes I had two pieces of drawer bottom, panels for a lid – anything that needs thin pieces of wood. And two shelves for my project, of course. Since the pieces were 6S intitially, the thin pieces are almost ready for use. Nifty!

A few dozen swipes with my 5 1/2 removed the band saw marks.

Time to do a mock-up to see if this would indeed look good. It did.

Shaping the panel and shelves

A couple of square cut planks on a square panel is not impressive, nor is it nice. These things may very well end up in face height, so rounded edges would be a nice touch for any future whoopsies and close encounters.

The first job was to square the ends, which I did on the shooting board.

I needed a way to create an even round-over on all the corners. There are some pretty nifty tools out there, but if one does not possess such luxuries… a random item will do just fine. I have a set of small hole saws, and they work great for this. Apparently they do not see much work elsewhere…

I then used my oscillating spindle sander to round off the corners after I chopped off the majority of the waste with a hand saw. Just some pure laziness, really.

The next job involved more power tools. I could easily have hand planed the round-overs, but I do have a router that can take 12mm shanks. So power tools it was, followed by a bit of hand sanding. I clamped two battens to the bench to lift the piece off of the surface, in order to make room for the bearing on the router bit. A holdfast kept the board in place during the ordeal.

The back corners of the shelf is not rounded over, which meant that I had to be VERY careful when routing near the right hand corner. With no support on the exit, I decided to play the safe card and stop shy of the corner. A few wiggles with a chisel and a few swipes with a file removed the waste and blended the area with the round-over I routed.

After a bit of routing, soul searching, acknowledging the powers of the dark side and a rather extensive sweeping job (which is why I loathe dust distributors power tools!), I had nice rounded edges on all the parts. A bit of hand sanding to remove any tool marks, and it was time to make holes. In my pristine, perfect oak panel.

On to the next page!