Sawdust on the Floor

I figured that making the upper book cases for our family room, wouldn’t be a big deal.  After all they were simply three equally sized, open shelved cases.  What could be hard about cutting them?  Well I soon found out that when working with wood, sometimes “size does matter” Before your mind starts heading for the gutter, let me explain.

We had elected to make the upper book cases out of solid 3/4″ oak.  So a trip to the local hardwood supplier and a heavy hit to my check book, provided me with enough stock to make the cases. I had purposely sought out stock that was 10″ or wider for the shelves and came in lengths that would allow me to get two or more shelves out of a single length of stock. I was able to rough cut all of the stock to length using my miter saw. The problem with this process is that the blade on my saw is not large enough to cut completely across the stock in a single cut. So a cut was made at a rough length, with the blade cutting about 3/4 way through the width of the stock. And then the stock was flipped over and the cut was completed from the opposite direction. At this point I really didn’t care that cuts were not perfectly square. Good thing that I didn’t because the cuts coming from two different sides often gave me a very irregular line.

After dressing the stock on my jointer and the surface planer, the stock was all ripped to its final length. And up to this point everything worked just as I had planned. The next task was to cut the stock to its final length.  The miter saw was out, due to the width of the stock, leaving me with only one option, or so I thought.  I decided to cut the stock to length on the table saw, using my miter gauge.  Boy what a mistake that was.  You see the sides of the book case needed to be cut at exactly 61″. The top, bottom and one fixed shelve needed to be cut at 43 3/4″ and all of the adjustable shelves needed to be 43″ long.  When I placed the first piece of stock against the miter gauge of the table saw, I realized I had a problem, the miter gauge is only 9″ long and the stock was 46″ to 65″ long,  There was just no way that this 9″ gauge could guide the long stock over the blade, without the stock wandering.  This wandering at best would cause an uneven cut, at worst the stock could jam into the blade and then be forcibly ejected back at me.  Neither situation was ideal.  I tried a trick I learned from my late father in law.  I bolted a sacrificial length of stock to the face of the miter gauge, but this created more problems.  When I bolted on a light weight  piece of stock, such as a piece of pine, it flexed too much to be of help.  When I added a thicker, heavier piece to the face of the miter gauge, I eliminated the flexing problem, but created another one.  The combined weight of the added piece plus the weight of the stock was almost too much to guide smoothly over the blade.  You don’t ever want to push the stock past the blade, you want to guide the stock past it.  I even tried cleaning the surface of the tablesaw and then treating it with a good coat of wax to help eliminate the drag of the stock.  But the combined weight was just too much.

Realizing that this option wasn’t going to work, I considered using a router and all in one clamp to square the ends of the stock for the sides and shelves. But rejected that after considering the amount of time required to set up all of the stock.  My solution was to fabricate a shop built cross cut sled.  At the time I made the bookcase, there were very few commercially available cross cut sleds on the market.  Today there are several that one could choose from. Basically, a cross cut sled, is a piece of either Plywood or MDF attached to a metal track that rides in the miter gauge slot on your table saw. On mine, I have a stop that is positioned exactly 90° from the blade.  All I have to do is hold the piece to be cut against the stop, and guide the stock over the blade.  The result is a clean smooth square cut.  Since I was only cutting off short pieces from the ends of my stock, I didn’t need to worry about the cut offs.  However, if I were making a cross cut where there was significant stock on both sides of the blade, I would want to have something on the other side of the blade to support the cut off.  If you take a look at the Cut off sled from Rockler, pictured above, you will see what they call a  Cutoff Sled platform mounted on the right side of the blade. It locks into place in the unused miter track and provides a place for the cut offs to safely rest.  By using a  Cutoff Sled platform, you also can reduce splintering on the ends of the stock.

Once the ends of the stock were cut square, I turned back to the router to cut rabbets in the top, bottom and a single rabbet 12″ from the top of the bottom rabbet, on all six pieces that would form the sides of the book case.  This single rabbet is for the only fixed shelf in the book case. Just like I had for the pine base cabinets, an all in one clamp and plunge router were used for this step. Then before I assembled the three book cases, I drilled holes for adjustable shelf pins.  The pins I selected use a 1/4″ hole drilled into the inside edge of the side pieces.  Each shelf uses four of these pins for support.  Because I didn’t want to take a chance of goofing when I drilled one of the holes for the shelves, I elected to use a shelving jig.  The jig is simply placed over the edge of the stock, providing you with clearly defined drill patterns to follow. 

After all of the holes were drilled for the shelves, I assembled the three book cases.  The bottom, top and fixed shelves were glued into place, and secured with predrilled sheet rock screws.  Once I had the cases assembled, I noticed that they were very susceptible to racking, which made sense The bookcases were purposely built without back panels which normally will prevent racking.  I realized that once the cases were installed, the racking issue would go away, so for now I simply tacked cross brace  pieces across the corners on the front of the book cases.

The upper bookcases were sanded completely before being finished with an oil based stain, followed by several coats of polyurethane.  After being allowed to dry completely, the three upper book cases were installed.  Just like the lower units, they were secured to the side walls of the room, each other and the bottoms of each cabinet was secured to the tops of the lower cabinets.  As discussed earlier, these upper cases do not go all the way to the ceiling.  In the space between the top of the bookcase and the ceiling, metal l brackets were installed.  The brackets were attached to the tops of the cases before they were moved into place. Once in place the other end of the brackets were secured with 4″ long sheet rock screws into wall studs.

For those of you who are still wondering about the size matters comment, if the stock had been normal width or length, then either the miter saw or the tablesaw could have satisfactorily cut the stock.  But because of the width and length, I had to  take additional steps.  So in this case, size matters.  Sorry I could resist.

How about coming back, when we dress out the upper book case with some custom molding, and then later build the face frame and doors for the lower bookcase

What started out as a simple project, a built in book case to house our ever growing collection of books, has turned into a complete rework of the family room. Discussions about what the book case should look like, how big it should be and what kind of finish details we wanted on the book case, soon lead to “While we are at it” types of conversations.  Which lead us to decide that the  book case should actually be built in, and occupy the side wall in the family room, which lead us to decide to also rework the front wall in the family room to remove a step in the wall created by the cinder blocks.  However, we decided that the step created by these cinder blocks, actually worked in our favor when it came to the built in book cases.

I was really concerned about building open shelved book cases that ran from the floor to the ceiling.   From a structural point I was concerned about how to anchor the book cases to the wall.  I could just see a eight foot high book case loaded with books, crashing to the floor someday, God forbid that anyone could be under it if that happened.  The fact that the wall we planned to install this book case on is  11′ long, meant that we would have to divide this space into three or preferably four sections. Which in itself complicates the issue of securing the book case to the wall, because all three or four sections would have to be secured together so if one came loose and started to fall, all of them would come down. Also, I had concerns about the visual appeal of a floor to ceiling open shelved book case.  While this may really look great in a library, or a McMansion style home, our home just did not lend itself to a massive wall of bookshelves. What we decided to do was to use the natural step in the wall created by the cinder blocks, as a separation point.  From the floor to the top of cinder blocks we would build out from the wall a set of enclosed book cases. By building out from the wall, we were able to create a wider platform, upon which we were able to safely install open shelved book cases.  The lower book cases would be anchored to the floor and the side walls.  The upper book cases were then in turn be secured to the lower book cases and the side wall.  As an added safety feature I decided to stop the upper bookcase short of the ceiling short of the ceiling by 6″.   On top of each of the upper bookcases, I installed a metal “L” bracket to the topside of each case and then into wall studs.  Since these brackets were on the top side of the cases, they wouldn’t be seen, but added a lot of peace of mind to a worrier like me.  

The first step was to once again remove the sheet rock  on the lower half of the wall and the particle board shelf installed by the builder.  There really wasn’t any reason to remove the  sheetrock, other than to add some insulation behind it.  We made an assumption based on findings of the front wall that the lower wall was devoid of insulation.  Unfortunately, we were correct.  Instead of studding out the wall and adding R13 insulation as we did on the front wall, we elected to use rigid foam insulation on this wall. Following manufacturer’s directions, we cut and adhered the insulation to the wall.  We figured that the rigid insulation plus several inches of books would provide adequate insulation for this wall.  Many years later, I can tell you that the assumption was correct.

On the upper portion of the wall, the sheetrock was also removed.  This time it was so that we could remove the leaking, ugly and useless sliding aluminum window that graced the wall.  Removing the window didn’t prove much of a task.  For some reason the builder hadn’t bothered to caulk around the window, nor had he used a significant number of fasteners to attach the window to the house.   In fact I think we found a total of 12 nails holding in this six foot slider. Oh well, their sloppy workmanship made it easy for us to remove the window.  It also explained why it leaked as badly as it did. With the window removed, I restructured the wall, added insulation and closed up the wall with sheet rock on the inside and siding on the outside. The sheet rock was taped, sanded and painted.

Original plans called for me to build the bottom bookcases totally out of 4/4 oak. But after pricing out wide 4/4 oak stock at several dealers, we decided to try a different approach.  The carcasses of the lower book cases would be made of pine.  An oak face frame would adorn the front of the cases, and within each case we would build and install oak raised panel doors. And after all of the lower cases were installed a single piece  would be attached over all of the cases.  This would serve not only as a decorative top, but would also help secure the cases together.

The lower cases were relatively simple to construct.  These cases consist of a right and left side, a top, center and bottom self.  On the back of each case is a 1/4″ thick piece of lauan plywood.  After purchasing the pine at the local big DIY store, I cut it  length for the pieces mentioned above, dressed one edge on the jointer and ran all of the stock through my surface planer to ensure that the stock was all the same size. Once the pieces were properly dressed and sized, I took the right and left ends and sat them on my work surface, inside edges facing up and clamped them together and flat on the work surface.  In this orientation, I could cut the rabbets for top, center and bottom shelf in both sides at once and not really have to worry about alignment issues if I cut each side individually.  To cut the rabbets, I used a 3/4″ straight bit installed in my plunge router.  The depth of the plunge was set to exactly 3/8″.  To ensure the correct placement of the rabbets, I used an all in one clamp as guide. Even though the All in One clamp secures itself to the stock, I added additional clamps to make sure that they did not move when I ran the router against them. Because pine is a relatively softwood, I was able to cut the 3/8″ rabbets in one pass. If it had been a hardwood like oak, then I would have cut each rabbet in a couple of passes.

Once the rabbets were cut, I took them along with the top and bottom selves to the table saw where I cut a 1/4″ wide rabbet along the back edge.  This rabbet was set back 1/4″ from the back edge of the pieces.  This rabbet is for the lauan plywood back.  The center shelf was then also taken back to the table saw where its width was reduced by a 1/2″.  ( 1/4″ Plywood plus the 1/4″ offset). Once this was done, the carcasses were assembled using glue and sheetrock screws driven from the outside of the end pieces, and through the plywood into the center shelf.   As each case was assembled, I kept checking to ensure that they were really true and square.  I should note that the bottom shelf was installed so that the top of the shelf was 2 1/2″ off the floor. The reason I did this was that I wanted the top of the shelf to be even with the top edge of the lower rail of the face frame.

When I was building the lower carcasses, I had cut the stock for all four sections, but I held off cutting the shelves for the last unit to their exact length until I had installed the first three cases.  While I trust my measuring skills, I have learned to always give yourself a little wiggle room whenever possible.  Thankfully, I had held off because the wall at the left end of the assembly was a little out of plumb, “gee what a shock”,  forcing the cases a 1/4″ closer together.  I had installed the first case on the left, followed by the one on its right. I skipped the next one and installed the one on the right end next.  Then by measuring the distance of the gap, I was able to final cut the shelves of the final unit to length.   When all four cases were installed, I secured them together and to the floor and the side walls.  I also took the time to verify that the tops of cases were level and shims were used as needed to bring the cases level.

Hey I just realized how long I have been talking. How about joining me later so we can build the upper cases.  See Ya

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