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Over the last two weekends I built a couple simple shelves. My external hard drives in my office were all over the place and the cable box was getting pretty hot on top of the battery backups. The other rack is for the living room components; surround amp, blue ray & cable box.
It's a pretty simple design. Both have 1/2" birch plywood shelves. The office rack has red oak legs and the other is walnut. One was finished with a couple coats of medium walnut danish oil, the other in natural danish oil. I plan to follow up the walnut rack with some wax.
Execution was fairly easy. For the first one; I cut dadoes in a piece of 1x8 red oak with my box joint blades then ripped then to width. I was planning to notch the plywood, but I nixed that idea and extended the legs at the top a bit. I also added some tapers to the legs instead of a bottom crossmember. I really do like my dubby taper jig. I should have left the shelves light like the second one.
The second was out of some rough sawn walnut I had onhand. I did all of the jointing and thicknessing with my handplanes. I don't like face jointing or thicknessing with handplanes all that much. One piece had developed a bow where the grain changed direction (right in the middle of the board). Edge jointing is a snap though. Sure is a lot easier than rolling out my little Chinese jointer. The second two pass dado I did on the first rack was a little loose. I set up a dado stack for this run since I was cutting two boards. I couldn't get it to match the ply without fabricating some shims so I cut it a bit tight and pared to fit with some chisels. I really need to get a flat bottomed dado stack, as my ancient craftsman stack doesn't do flat bottoms and it's getting pretty dull. My little router plane and miniature Veritas shoulder plane cleaned up the bottoms easily. Using a file on the edge banding went a lot easier than what I tried previously link.
It's a pretty simple design. Both have 1/2" birch plywood shelves. The office rack has red oak legs and the other is walnut. One was finished with a couple coats of medium walnut danish oil, the other in natural danish oil. I plan to follow up the walnut rack with some wax.
Execution was fairly easy. For the first one; I cut dadoes in a piece of 1x8 red oak with my box joint blades then ripped then to width. I was planning to notch the plywood, but I nixed that idea and extended the legs at the top a bit. I also added some tapers to the legs instead of a bottom crossmember. I really do like my dubby taper jig. I should have left the shelves light like the second one.
The second was out of some rough sawn walnut I had onhand. I did all of the jointing and thicknessing with my handplanes. I don't like face jointing or thicknessing with handplanes all that much. One piece had developed a bow where the grain changed direction (right in the middle of the board). Edge jointing is a snap though. Sure is a lot easier than rolling out my little Chinese jointer. The second two pass dado I did on the first rack was a little loose. I set up a dado stack for this run since I was cutting two boards. I couldn't get it to match the ply without fabricating some shims so I cut it a bit tight and pared to fit with some chisels. I really need to get a flat bottomed dado stack, as my ancient craftsman stack doesn't do flat bottoms and it's getting pretty dull. My little router plane and miniature Veritas shoulder plane cleaned up the bottoms easily. Using a file on the edge banding went a lot easier than what I tried previously link.
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