Shelves 2

Working With Wood Continued

Here are the tools that I'll be using to make the holes for the shelves. The piece on the left is one of the rods that came with floating shelf kit that I used last time. I had two leftover rods from that previous project so I thought I'd use them here. The item next to the rod is a center finder. I use this tool to find the center of my layout lines that are in pencil.

Next is a center drill, which is a rigid type of drill that won't walk or flex while using it. This is key to make sure that your drill follows this machined hole so it ends up in the exact location you intended. And last is my 7/16" diameter drill, or drills in this case. I'll use the shorter one first until I run out of drill-length and then switch over to the longer one to finish the depth.

If you look close you can see two clamps holding my 'story stick' to my shelf.

I've placed two marks on my story stick and then once it's clamped in place, I transfer both lines onto my work piece. Then I remove the story stick and use my center finder to pickup those pencil lines.

Next I use my center drill to prepare for my drill.

And last I use my 7/16" diameter drill and go as deep as I can before switching over to the longer one.

Here is what it looks like once the holes are drilled and my hardware installed. Those pencil lines represent the outer edges of my hardware. What I'll be doing next is making a recess for the hardware to sit flush with the back of the shelf.

I used my table saw and my cross-cut sled to make my dado cuts for the brackets. I also used a work stop clamped to my fence because all three shelves have a bracket in the same place.

A close-up of the dado between the arrows. This process takes many passes with my saw blade because I was using my normal rip blade that is 1/8" thick.

A few minutes later I had all my dados finished. This didn't too long doing it this way and it went smooth. Now it's time to work with some metal.

Working With Steel

What I'm getting ready to make is one single bracket because I only had five and I need six. No big deal so I found some steel, cut it oversize and started machining it.

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