I Will Build You A New Life...

(With apologies to Everclear -- goodness, the stuff that one listened to in college...)

I think it must be one of the effects of spending one's days in a cube, in front of a computer, doing things for which people are terribly grateful but which it's nearly impossible to explain to one's children over dinner, that one finds oneself every so often wanting to Build Something With Your Hands. And being as red-blooded an American male as the next fellow, when this urge comes upon me it is inevitably something Big that involves using Power Tools that I desire to make.

Last time this resulted in a 7 foot mahogany bookshelf. Now, I'm sure that the furniture making urge will come again, but right now there is still room for at least 100-200 more books before we totally run out of space again (and that's after the library book sale last weekend). Besides, I'm thinking something that doesn't involve quite so much fine finishing work. (Yes, 14+ hours of sanding gets old after a while.)

And so while watching the monkeys tear around the back yard the other evening it struck me: What our young ladies need is a playhouse. When I mentioned this to them, they wanted to get started right away and build it out of sticks -- like the house at Pooh Corner, I suppose. But this is not the idea which catches Daddy's fancy. No, Daddy's imagination leans in the direction of lumber and plywood and nails and the circular saw. A while back I was fascinated to read about Matt and Amber's early building experiment with the workshop/shed on their property. So I think I'm picturing something built on a 6x9 foot base (conveniently the same size as a sheet of plywood), walls about 5.5 feet high, and a gravel foundation.

Sure it'll be hell to move someday, and the home owner's association would have a fit if they found out -- but for what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors, and play with lumber and power tools in the meantime.
I think I need to go pick up a pad of graph paper and a drafting pencil at lunchtime...

A Shelf Shall Rise

The bookshelf building project has been stretching into quite the major undertaking -- as shown by the fact that my last post (on how to cut even shelves) was fully two months ago. Some of this has simply been lack of time to work on the project, but it also took a good 14+ hours of work to get all the shelvs and the uprights through three rounds of sanding, and thus ready to take a good smooth finish

I took Friday off work to put some major work in on the project: because the books are piling up on the floor and MrsDarwin has told me I can't buy any more until I've finished the shelf.

The shelves were sanded and ready to go, so the next step was to cut the uprights even, which I did with the helps of a square, clamps and the circular saw. The uprights stand 7' 1" high. On the bottom, I cut out a space for it to nestle up against a baseboard, and also a two inch curve in the middle, so it stands on 2.5-inch-wide legs with the baseboard cut-out in the back.

I'd borrowed a router from a friend at work so I cut grooves for the shelves to rest in, about 1/8in deep. I was seriously worried about cutting them at different points on the two uprights, so I clamped them next to each other on my workbench and routed them both at once. The tricky part at this point is getting the shelves spaced right. You have to account for a two inch clearance on the router from the guiding edge to the edge of the bit, and then the bit is cutting a 3/4in groove. As a result, the shelves are not exactly the heights I'd meant. The first two came out a perfect 12in, but the next two came out to 10 3/4 instead of 11, and one that was meant to be 10in came out as 9 1/4 and so on. Still, they look moderately even, and books fit on them, which is the important thing.

Once I had my grooves cut, I drilled three nail holes down the center of each groove. The grooves thus serve three functions: provide extra support to the shelf, provide a channel for the wood glue, ensure exact placement of the nails so that they always go exactly into the center of the shelf.

That's where things stood as of Saturday evening. Sunday, we cleared all the furniture out of the dining room after church and started assembly. I'd thought a lot about how best to tackle assembling the shelf, and I ended up deciding that it was best to assemble it ladder-fashion, starting in the middle and working out. In the picture on the left, you can see it with three shelves in.

The tricky thing with assembly is that there's no good way to clamp a 42" wide bookshelf, so the we'd put glue in both grooves, set the shelf, and then drive the nails in order to hold the shelf in place tightly for the glue to set.

Since I'm dealing with real wood rather than ply here, and since the African Mahogany in particular tends to re-warp a little bit after being milled, some of the boards had a slightly curvature (either lateral or horizontal) that we had to deal with. The biggest issue was with the top couple shelves, by which point we set it up on it's side and had MrsDarwin put all the weight she could on the upright in order to hold in flat and tight while I nailed it down.

On the right you and see the shelf as we left it last night. The top is clamped down against its supports while it dries. Later this week we'll be putting the back on it and routing a curved edge along the top shelf and the outside edges. Last of all comes finishing, which after several experiments looks like it will be done with lacquer. So we're probably about a week out from having a finished shelf.

Bookcase Update

Some may recall that there's a project ongoing here to build a full size (7' by 3.5') bookshelf out of African Mahogany for the growing Darwin library.

Travels and such had slowed me down on working on the project, but I'd also run into logistical difficulties since the table saw I borrowed from a friend only has rails that allow cuts up to 32 inches wide, while I wanted to cut my selves to 42 inches. I made an attempt to use the wall as a guide by placing the table saw a measured distance away from the inside garage wall. Perhaps a good idea in theory, but it just doesn't work. (Drywall isn't click enough to slide against, for one thing.)

So some thought went into how do cut my shelfs, since I certainly didn't want to cut the project down to a 32in wide shelf.

The solution (which seems to have worked well) is as follows. I bought a 4ft pine 1x12 and also a 2x4. I then borrowed a circular saw and bought myself a square and set of clamps. I cut a piece from the 2x4 and nailed it down to my workbench to get myself an end guide. Then I cut the 1x12 (using the squire to guide both cuts) down to 1.5in shorter than my finished shelf height (since the clearance on the circular saw is 1.5in).

I then took the rough shelves I had (which were cut to about three inches over finished length) and first clamped down the square and cut off a 1.5in piece, and then flipped it around, put the 1x12 guide on top, clamped everything down, and made the second cut. (You can see this rig in the photo above.)

This netted me out a set of shelves that are all exactly the same width, except the top one which I cut 1.5in over, since I want that to go all the way across the cap the sides.

So far so good. The next steps are routing out the slots for the shelves to go into, and sanding everything to a nice smooth finish. More updates to come...