debating how to make shelves...

[Silvan]

I'm knocking out a little set of shelves to go under one wing of my TS and hold my collection of hand planes close to my workbench.

I had one odd piece of plywood salvaged from a library magazine rack, and I more or less just started cutting on it without a concrete plan. I made the first crosscut as wide of a piece as I could manage in my little shop; somewhere in the neighborhood of 30". I cut the next one to the same length. That left me with a third piece a smidge longer than the first two. I ripped it into four equal pieces 3" wide. I chose to use narrow uprights to encourage air circulation, to keep the rust off my planes.

What I want to end up with is a simple shelf with four upright pieces and two shelves. I might make a third shelf out of another piece of this magazine rack. So now I'm left with a choice for how to join the shelves to the uprights.

Plan A. I could cut dadoes in all four upright pieces to admit the shelves. Then glue and screw them in. Problems with this plan are: no dado stack, and that's a lot of kerf-and-chiseling to do; a lot of room to screw up. Advantages are: easy to keep the shelves level, probably strong with minimal glue/screw if I get the dadoes to fit tightly.

Plan B. I could cut notches out of all the shelves to admit the uprights. Problems with this plan are: alignment/leveling of the shelves becomes more problematic. Advantages: less kerf-and-chiseling to do.

Plan C. Just screw the damn thing together. Advantages: it doesn't have to take much weight, and that would probably be fine. Disadvantages: it seems like a really wussy thing for a Real Dorker to do.

Plan D. Use this as justification to buy a dado set.

[Dave Balderstone]

You don't have a router to cut the dados?

[Silvan]

The short answer is no. The long answer involves a lot of ranting about what a completely useless POS my router is. :)

I'd rather have a dado stack anyway, if it comes down to spending money. I can wait indefinitely before getting a new router.

[TWS]

A rule in the brotherhood of woodworking states that in any set of two or more options you *must* reject any options that do not require new tools.

TWS

[jo4hn]

[snip]>

Sounds to me like what YOU want to do is Plan A and Plan D, not necessarily in that order. You have my blessing. mahalo, jo4hn

[Dave Balderstone]

As long as there's a new tool involved, then you're on the right track. My POS saw won't accept a dado stack, so I invested in the router and find I can't live without it.

[bridger]

snip a bunch of terrible half assed ideas.....

Uh Huh......

[Bernard R]

IMO the cost of a reasonable dado set is a significant part of a good router, and whereas a dado set is only good for one job, namely cutting through dados, a router is a multi functional tool, which, with a little ingenuity can do a better job than a dado.

Last year I had a number of shelves to build into kitchen cabinets and routed them all. I set up 2 parallel boards onto wooden bearers, one board was fixed and the other slotted for small adjustment to allow for differences between the ply thickness.

Unless you are always working ply and add lipping after all machining I don't see the great attraction of dado sets.

BernardR

[George]

Cut, butt, back fully. Planes have happily lived in fully enclosed toolchests for literally centuries.

What concerns me is that you've got something more suited at 3" to mount on a wall rather than stand up. My under wing shelf (8") gets bumped once in a while, which makes me glad that it holds only unbreakable.

[Silvan]

Cool. Can I get that calligraphed on vellum somewhere so's to make it look all official and stuff? :)

[Silvan]

It's an unheated space. Everything rusts like crazy certain times of year unless I keep the air flowing.

That didn't come through very well in my rant. The uprights are 3" but the shelves are, well, bigger. I'm not sure how bigger. Call it 18" x 30" with a total of four uprights.

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| []|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||[] []|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||[] []|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||[] ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| []|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||[] []|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||[] []|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||[] |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

[Silvan]

Hah. I'd love to have a dado set. There are lots of uses for a wide kerf in one pass. A lot of these uses are an alternative to using a banshee to do the same job.

I'm not a router virgin, I just don't like them much. There are other ways to do almost everything, and I prefer those other ways. I can coax my piece of crap router into doing everything I *have* to use it for (namely, picture frame type stuff), and beyond that, I really have little use for it. Replacing it has been at the bottom of my list for years.

[Silvan]

The Mibro one at Lowe's is not recommended, is it?

I guess I should STFW already. I'm sure that question has been beaten to death.

I'm thinking in that direction, although maybe not quite yet. I should just slap it together and get it over with really, and save my dado set money to put toward zither pins and stuff. I've got a hankering to build a hammered dulcimer. Got some, well, I hate to admit it, but, yes, plans (ugh) to see how these things work, and I think I can pull it off. I've wanted one for yearrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrs. This is sounding like a plan.

First I have to secure supplies of species not locally available. It seems to be 100% universal that these things always use rock maple where it counts, and all I can get is soft. I need to get some real plywood too. This stuff I've got has pine plys. Yuck.

Ugh. Maybe I should buy the dado set anyway. :)

(Or maybe I should wait until SWMBO's surgery bills come in, and see if I can afford any of this. Damn, there I go being practical again. :( )

[George]

OK, so it is standing stable. Use cleats if it's not going to be shown as an example of your woodworking prowess.

Still more dubious about the planes. They'll develop rust where they're supported, so use something like that green plastic fencing material that looks like expanded metal to set them on, or get them into a closed box with camphor. Whatever you do, don't set them on bare wood, which actively grabs water on its own.

[Silvan]

Yeah, I could definitely do cleats, but they're so so lame. Might just do that anyway because who wants to futz with any kind of fancy joinery in plywood anyway?

Should be OK. They've been on my waxed workbench all summer/fall. Only a couple of teensy rusty spots, up in the guts, like at the iron to frog junction on just one plane. This wood is pre-finished with something. It used to be a piece of furniture that I got for $2.

[TWS]

Might have to carve it into a nice hunk of lumber. Hmmm, might mean I need to get some new carving knives or chisels...

TWS