Sawdust on the Floor

This is a tale of what sounded like a really good idea, but went really badly. My wife and I had been talking about adding some decorative features to our living room; we had an open wall behind the television that was begging for some decoration. Being normal, rational thinking people we proposed and dismissed all of the normal items that are used to decorate a wall, and some how latched on the idea of floating shelves.

Once we had locked onto that idea, all we had to do was find the shelves that would look right. And guess what, during one of my weekly trips to the big orange DIY store, I found the two floating shelves pictured at the right. And even better they were on sale. This is the point that this thing started going wrong. After carefully following the instructions (well I really didn’t read them, but I looked at the pictures) for mounting the shelves, I put them on the wall. And they looked good for about a week, and then we noticed that they were starting to droop, soon followed by them delaminating. The reason that they were coming apart is that they were made of a product called hard board, which in my option is nothing more then pressed cardboard.

I took them back off the wall and tried to shim up the mounting bracket, the keep the shelves from drooping. And you guessed it, it didn’t work. So now we had a new problem, we agreed that the floating shelves were a good idea, but the product we choose were the wrong thing. We wanted to take them off the wall, but when I installed them, I mounted them into the studs with pre drilled screw holes. Removing the floating shelves would leave holes in the wall that would need to be filled and then re painted. And of course we knew that would really mean repainting the entire wall, as the patched holes would not blend. A better idea had to be found.

This is the fix we came up with. Borrowing an idea from an old woodworking magazine, I decided to make my own floating shelves. I know, why didn’t I try this in the first place? That’s a really good question and I wish I had a really good answer for that, but I don’t.

The biggest problem in making these shelves was to find the proper wood for the floating shelves. I normally work in solid oak, but oak is a very dense wood which also makes it a very heavy wood. I was searching for a good looking wood that was also very light weight. I wanted to keep the weight down because I didn’t want the shelves to droop or pull away from the wall. I settled on using mahogany for many reasons. Mahogany finishes very nicely and is much lighter then oak.

My floating shelves are 42” long, 8 “wide and 2” tall. I started by first cross cutting a piece of 9” wide 4/4 mahogany, to approximately 54”. Then I ran one edge over the jointer to square up one edge. Then before ripping the wood into 2” wide pieces, I ran the entire board through the thickness paner.  After ripping the stock to the 2” width, I took it to my miter saw and cut 10” off the end of each one the four pieces. The 10” pieces were to become the ends and the remaining 44” inch pieces were for the front and back of each of shelves.

The next step was to add a decorative edge to the front and both sides of the floating shelves. For this I turned to my shaper table, which I equipped with a fluting bit like the one shown here on the far right. I experimented with a scrap piece of stock until I got the right height of the bit. I also equipped the shaper table with hold downs and a feather board. The hold downs are used the keep the stock from rising up, and the feather boards are used to keep the stock in contact with the bit. Even with the use of feather boards, I found some dips or rough edges in the pattern. I suspect that the stock jumped away from the bit at this point. I corrected these by running the stock over the router bit again.

Once I had all of the decorative edges cut, I turned the stock over and created a ¼” x ¼” dado along the length of all of the pieces, front, sides and the back piece. The dado was placed at ¾” of the top of each piece. I cut the dado using my tablesaw. In the original plans the dado was for a piece of ¼” plywood, I choose to use some re claimed lumber for this instead. Even though the wood would not show, plywood just doesn’t stain very well, and even if no one else ever saw it, I would know it was there.

After a quick visit to my miter saw, where I cut miters for the front corners of the shelves. I considered also cutting miters into the rear corners, but decided to go with a simple rabbit joint along the back edge of the floating shelve.

I applied glue along all of the joints. I used my small nail gun to insert small brads on the rabbit joint in the rear. To hold the miter joints together while the glue sat up, I used a couple of spring clamps. These ingenious clamps do a great job on miters; the only draw back is that when used on softwood like Mahogany they do mar the surface of the wood. This was followed by a couple of hours of down time while the glue cured.

I used a mahogany tinted wood filler to repair the marks caused by the spring clamps. Then did a light sanding of the entire piece and then applied a coat of an oil based mahogany stain.

This is where the project took a down turn. Over the past couple of years we have used General Finishes to stain and seal our projects. This time, we were in a hurry to get this project finished and up on the wall so we went to our local DIY store and picked up a brand of stain that we gave up on using when we found General since General is not available anywhere close to our home. Well, that was a mistake. The stain never really dried well enough to put polyurethane on and the color was very muddy. My wife and I were both very unhappy with the results. Luckily, I had enough extra lumber to rebuild the shelves. So we began the entire building process over again.

My wife is in the process of sanding down the original set and if she is able to remove all of the stain in those tiny decorative beads, we will then have two sets of shelves to decide how we are going to finish. As I said earlier, normally mahogany finishes easily. I may have to revise that statement with this project! We’ll keep you posted on what we decide to do with the shelves and post a picture of the finished project.

The lessons learned here: as a woodworker I should have realized that I would never be happy with a piece of furniture that was not made out of real wood, no matter the price. Also, before using a stain on a project, finish a scrap piece of wood to see how it takes the stain before you finish your entire project. We knew that but we all make mistakes especially when we’re in a hurry.  Hopefully, we’ve learned a valuable lesson.

For more information regarding the woodworking tools used in this project, click on the highlighted links above.