Gayus Wood

Bookcases Project The Shelves

Cant sleep, so Ill do another bookcases post.

I had to design the cases to fit an existing space between an outside wall with a door close to the wall the cases were going on, and a fireplace.  There was also a doorway in the wall that was not centered.  As a result, the two sides are different widths.  The right side is about 51" wide and the left 42".  That made the shelves on the right about 48" wide and that is a bit long for a simple shelf that will hold books.  After considering various shelf designs, I settled on a torsion box design that would be light weight, but not too thick, and would be more than stiff enough to prevent sag.

Drawing of shelf with top skin removed.

 I had two cauls (from Woodpecker) long enough clamp the edges of the shelves, but needed four more to be able to clamp the top and bottom surfaces.  Couldnt buy more since they were "One Time" tools, so I just made some out of 2x4s.  I wound up using two of the cauls along with a piece of 2x6 to make a jig that the shelves would be built and clamped upon.  This came about from building the prototype and finding clamping the whole thing to be an exercise in frustration.  The jig made assembly and clamping much easier.

The jig, cauls and some of the clamps ready to start making a shelf.

 I first laid out the ribs and ends on the jig so they could be tacked together with my pin gun.

Ribs and ends laid out.

Tacking with the pin gun.

 I then waxed the skin to prevent glue from messing it up for staining.  Wont do that again with oak ply, as it is not easy to get it all out of the pores when you clean it with alcohol.  The wood stained okay, but the problem showed up when finishing with the oil-modified-water based poly I use.  I even sealed first with a de-waxed shellac, but still had a lot of orange peel that had to be scraped and refinished several times.  If I ever do it again, Ill use packing tape to keep glue off, like I did on the wooden cauls.


The skin was placed on the jig with the waxed side down, glue was applied to the parts and they were laid out on the skin.  Then the glue was applied for the other skin, and the skin slid in place under the clamp that was used temporarily to hold the edges together.


With that, the cauls and clamps were added and left on over night.



Next the shelf was cut to size, as I made them longer and wider than required.  I then used a scraper to clean up any saw marks on the edges.  A couple of stops to act as supports and two clamps in the SME on the edge of my bench made holding the shelf easy.



All that was left was trimming the edges down to the skin surface, sanding, staining, and finishing.