With a warmup project out of the way, I decided that it was time to start the bookcase.  So Saturday morning I made a quick trip to the Home Depot and rummaged thru the pine stacks until I found enough pieces that I could work with.  I ended up bringing (4) 1x12x8ft boards of clear pine home with me.  That should be enough lumber for the carcass with the drawers being another matter altogether.

Saturday afternoon was spent drawing out a full-scale working drawing.  Since this bookcase is larger than the paper I have at hand, I opted to just draw the left side front of the case.  This will give me all of the pertinent information that I need as to where the shelves go.  I also added a side view of the angled shelf location so that I could determine exactly where it would go.  The drawing looks a little awkward but has all of the important information for the carcass.  Height, width, depth and joinery locations.

The remainder of my shop time Saturday was spent preparing the sides and laying out all of the joinery and knifing in all the lines.  The angled dados were a little tricky, but a sliding bevel and square made the layout pretty simple once I got my head around it.  That is as far as I got on Saturday.

Sunday afternoon I began cutting in the joinery.  Nothing too exciting here.  A lot of hammer and chisel work followed up with the router planes.

I then sized and surfaced the top panel and the shelf that will be directly above the drawers.  The top panel joins to the sides with a three-part finger joint that will eventually be pegged with bamboo pegs.  Layout is straight forward.  I used a pair of dividers and, thru trial and error, adjusted them for three equal divisions of the tops width.  Then I cut the joint starting with the top panel and then fitting it to the sides.

The shelf above the drawers simply fits into a full-width housing dado.  I had already cut the dado at 18mm wide knowing that all of the lumber that I am using is at least 19mm thick.  To fit the shelf to the existing dado I simply planed the ends of the shelf until I had a snug fit and the evened up the remainder of the shelf with a few swipes of the plane.  All of this work was done on what will be the bottom of this shelf.

Then I dry fit the components to see where I was at.  It was at this point that it dawned on me that I don’t have a single clamp that is long enough for assembling this bookcase.  Dang it!

So sometime during the course of this week I’ll need to make a trip to Harbor Freight and purchase some longer clamps and then set them up for use.

Part 1 Greg Merritt Part 3