Margin for glass shelves...

[blueman]

The bathroom cabinet I am building has 7 adjustable (with shelf pins)

5/16" glass shelves.

The sides and back are painted birch plywood and the face frame is poplar and the dimensions are 18" x 9" (the cabinet is pretty square).

What is a good margin to leave so that I won't have issues with shelves sticking due to expansion, paint layers (over time), measurement tolerance etc.

I made a blank of 1/4" plywood that had 1/16" margins (17 7/8 x 8 7/8) which certainly would give enough room but I'm wondering whether it would be wise to tighten them up a bit to say decrease the margin to

1/32".

So what is a standard margin for a good quality cabinet in such a situation. (I know this is not a scientific question but I wanted to get input from people who have built such cabinets before)

[blueman]

Also, should one use tempered glass for such a situation?

I am planning on ordering polished edges at least for the front edge. Is it common to polish all edges or is that likely to be a waste of money and should I just go with polishing the visible front one.

Anything else that one should consider when ordering glass for shelves for a bathroom cabinet?

Note I am planning on using 5/16th glass to match the thickness of some existing glass shelves in the bathroom.

[Sonny]

If existing glass shelf tolerances have worked fine, why not continue to use those tolerances with the new shelves.

I would assume if you pay for the edges to be polished, the fee is for any number of edges. I think the fee is for polishing, period, not dependent on the number of edges. Otherwise, the fee is an hourly fee. Any additional fee can't be that much to complain about....

5-10 minutes to polish 7 small panes!

Sonny

[Swingman]

I typically make shelves 1/4" - 5/16" narrower in width than the width between the interior end panels.

If you do have trouble, due to the shelves being a bit too wide for the thickness of the doubled (one on each side), typical shelf pin standard, simply turning all four shelf pins upside down will generally solve the problem.

[blueman]

The shelf pins I use don't have a side lip

i was thinking 1/16th clearance on each side would be enough.

Any reason not to use the above style pins?

[Swingman]

I prefer these, because, IMO, their design adds a bit more shear strength to loaded shelves when the bottom of the "L" is down, but YMMV:

[blueman]

But these are 18x9" medicine cabinet type shelves - so no heavy loads - mostly medicine bottles, wife's makeup stuff, toilet paper, tissue boxes, etc. I wouldn't think more than 10lbs/shelf max.

And since the shelves are glass I prefer smaller, less obtrusive pins.

But for heavy wooden book shelves, I see why the other style would have benefits...

[Swingman]

Yours will work just fine for that application, a point which I intended to make, but got sidetracked on a local issue (chewing out local officials via mail for their lack of planning to deal with extreme event issues) :)

I would allow just a bit more than 1/16" on either side ... 1/8" would be more advantageous IME with lots of shelves in beaucoup cabinets and houses.

[chaniarts]

edge work is usually paid by the linear inch.

[chaniarts]

yes, order them tempered. get the dimensions right though, as you can't get them recut.

[dadiOH]

All you need is enough to get them on the pins.

None at all.

[Bruce]

On Mon, 9 Jan 2012 08:23:36 -0700, blueman wrote (in article ):

5/16 glass is quite strong, I don't thing tempered is required unless there is going to be lots of impacts on it. Also consider that 1/16" is not uncommon for the cutting tolerance of the shelves so add that in.

-Bruce