Jefferson Bookcases – Contents
This is a #buildBlog of the process of building the bookcases that hold my books in Santa Fe. I built them myself, and learned a lot about #woodworking along the way, and hopefully can share some of that knowledge in these articles.
- Introduction, including a photo of how I set up my workbench for building the bookcases. Having my mise en place consistent made building 70 cases possible.
- Building the Plinths, which describes and shows the method I use for cutting mitered dovetail corners while constructing the plinths, on which stacks of bookcases rest.
- Large Case Tail Boards (sides), which covers cutting the tails on the side boards of the largest (at this point) cases. I also included answers to some questions people had asked me about the construction process, and linked to some of my Handy Tools I used while building the cases.
- Large Case Pin Boards and Backs walks through the rest of the construction of a case. When this finishes, the case is in the clamps with the glue drying.
- Winging it with Big Cases talks about how I discovered that the largest cases I had designed weren't large enough for some of my very large art books. So I had to change the design a bit. This is one of the many nice things about building the cases myself. Had I ordered them from a builder, the discovery of the extra-large books would've blown up the cost quite a bit.
- A Back for the Oversized Case shows details of the ship-lap joint between two back-boards and puts a back on the oversized case. It also shows how to square up a case which was slightly out of square.
- Smoothing and Prep for Shellac in which the hand planes come out.
- Cleaning up a Dovetail shows how I cut out the waste between pins (it's a similar process for tails) and then clean up a little using a rasp until the joint goes together smoothly.
- First Shellac sees me applying the first two coats of shellac to a case.
- Second Shellac gets the third (and final) coat of shellac on a case.
- Back Boards discusses one of my first big “performance optimizations” building the bookcases. I cut the time per pair of back boards for a case to a quarter of the time it previously took, from about an hour to about 15 minutes per pair of boards.
- Interlude and Medium Bookcases talks about the size of the medium-sized cases to hold hardcovers and shows the cut-list for the lumber. It also has a guest appearance by my Lava Lamp.
- More Plinths, Different Sizes covers a couple more sizes of plinths (one for the art books, which will have a deeper case, and four for stacks with a medium case as the base, and smaller paperback cases atop that).
- Art Books Case has another cut-list, this time for a larger case to hold art-books. It also describes making 1x16 boards out of narrower pieces by edge-jointing them and gluing them together.
- The Littlest Case has the cut-list for the smallest case for very small hardbacks or standard (5¼×7¼ inch) paperbacks.
- Three Sizes of Plinths has cut-lists for all three different sizes of plinths I ended up building to accommodate the different-sized cases.
- The Little Things covers some tips and tricks I've learned along the way, and has a progress update showing 37 cases in 8 stacks.
- A Periodic Update gets the total up to 47 cases in 8 stacks and shows some other numbers in the months of making boxes.
- The End of January Update didn't have a lot of progress, but that seems to be how Januarys go around here.
- The Home Stretch? is another progress update. Up to 57 cases at this point.
- The Wrap-up is a completed project post. The grand total was 70 cases in just about 18 months.
#Contents #bookcases #buildBlog
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