Tuesday 9 October 2012

A couple of Shelves and Side-Tables

A couple of Shelves and Side-Tables


A little while ago I was asked to produce some shelves and bed-side tables for Anthony. Here is what I managed to produce for him.

The first port of call was obviously the suppliers to get the relevant bits and pieces for the project. He wanted soft-wood for the tables so I picked up some nice and chunky sleeper style pieces to use for them. The legs were going to be made from 10x10 posts. The shelves as per other projects were going to be made from old scaffolding planks.
As I am still to get an amazing set of tools, the initial cuts are still being made by my circular saw. Whilst it does the job and get through smoothly, there are always lines that do not join on the cut face. It's annoying but can be removed with a bit of planing and sanding. For the scaffolding boards, I used the circular saw as well as it flew through them.

As Anthony has a recessed alcove in his house, he asked that the shelves all come out to be in line with the fireplace, which meant that I would have to extend all of the boards by 3cm. This meant that I had to make up extra pieces to slide on to the back of each shelf so that they sat flush. I have to say this was probably the trickiest part of the whole project. I used some pieces of pine doweling to join the boards together and covered them in wood glue to make sure that the joins were rigid. After all, one of these shelves was going to be holding his TV so it needed to be strong.






The best way for me to make the extra pieces was to take 
a separate board and then slice it length ways at the desired length and then measure it up against the board it would attach to. All in all I had to make 4 of these.














On the left here you can see the set of boards that are to be used for the TV shelf. This was made in pretty much the same way as the other shelves but there needed to be a diagonal in it to fit nicely in the recess. A lot of jiggery pokery and I managed to get it all flush. 




After I planed it all down and sanded the life out of it to get rid of all of the staining from years of hard work as a builders mate, it ended up looking like this. A hell of a lot nicer than how it started out. A few coats of stain to come and it will be a beautiful part of Anthony's home.









When I was sanding the boards down, I managed to unearth some lovely features on them. These letters were scattered across the boards in several places and once sanded back, they added some nice character features to several of the shelves. I also managed to polish up some of the metal work on one of the other shelves, which was used to add support to the boards at either end. It was horrible and rusted when I got it, but after a bit of grinding, I got it to look quite nice. 


Next came the tables which were a pleasure to make compared to the shelves. A few cuts here and a few cuts there and then all that was needed were several pilot holes for the screws and a quick levelling off. To get them level I had to plane a little bit off one or two of the legs and that was it. Relatively simple compared to the shelves.






 Here you can see one of the tables in an almost finished form. At this stage, it just needed a level and a bit of stain to finish it all off.











As you can see on the left, the legs needed some work, before the table was going to hold a pen without it falling off.






The final outcome was a lovely little set of tables like this. This is with one coat of stain and prior to a wax going on the top to help protect it. I will have the completed pictures up soon of the tables and shelves in their new homes.

Thanks for looking and be sure to check back soon for the finalized pics


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