Working With Wood Continued

Here are the two vertical pieces fastened in place. Now I don't have the oil bottles yet but I left these pieces slightly long just in case I needed the extra length. Side note: these kinda look like goal posts...
 

Anyways,here is one of the two bottles that my daughter picked out. Now this one is 4.4" tall (which includes the cork) and is 2 5/16" diameter. The neck area is just under 1 1/2" diameter, which is the area that I'm going to hang them by. What I'm going to do next is make a bunch of shelves to hold them, all 20 of them, per spice rack, times two (2 spice racks = 40 bottles). 
 

I'm experimenting with a hole-saw here because I need to make some U shaped slots in the shelves to hold all the bottles. My plan was to first use 1 3/8" diameter hole-saw to rough out the holes. Second I'd bore each hole on my milling machine to 1 1/2" exactly. Third I'd layout some lines and use my bandsaw to rough out all the slots. And last I'd come back and use my milling machine again to bring all those slots to size.

As you can see the one on the left has a bunch of tear-out. But the one on the right had a scrap piece below it, which produced almost no tear-out. However, after thinking about all this, and all the work I'd have to do on my milling machine, I started rethinking this entire operation.
 

I'm going to make some tooling to help me produce the U shaped slots using my router. This tooling, or fixture will be overkill but it will get the job done accurately, which is all I care about.

The base (below) will be made out of 2" X 12" that I had from another project and should work great for this once it's flat. But after running it through my planer it still wasn't flat. What I did was epoxy a thin wooden shim to one low spot (arrow) and then ran it through my planer again.
 

I'm laying out for some screws and dowels on these two hardwood rails that I made special for this fixture (top and bottom pieces). As you can see my shelf (black walnut) is between them. My plan is to slid my shelf between those rails, trapping it so it doesn't move in the top-to-bottom direction (Y axis).
 

Here I'm drilling holes for some screws and some wood dowels. The reason I'm using four screws and four dowels here is because I thought about cutting the rails in two pieces. Then with screws and dowels in both pieces, I would know they wouldn't move out of position after cutting them in half. I did this same procedure for the other rail.
 

Pay no attention to those weird slots and holes that you see below because this piece of MDF was used on another project.

Anyways, I'm making a clamp plate to hold my shelf (work piece) in place while I'm using my router. The arrows are pointing to the width of the clamping area, which will actually put downward pressure on my work piece. The remainder of the clamp plate is just clearance.
 

I'm using a 1/4" endmill to make a nice clean edge along the entire clamping area of my clamp plate. Also notice the small groove I made with the endmill. This groove will also provide clearance so these nice straight edges don't come in contact with anything they shouldn't. This is an old machinist trick that is common in the industry.