A Quick Trip and Starting the Shelves

I forgot to mention in my last entry that I was up to visit the Inside Passage School of Woodworking last Sunday. The reason was to drop off some wood that I had slabbed up last winter. About 40 slabs, mostly elm and maple, but with a few other odds n' ends including catalpa, Port Orford Cedar, old growth red cedar, and an unknown but very attractive cypress of some sort. Possibly Monterey Cypress. (My picture at the top of this blog is of me slabbing up the Port Orford log, of which IP received several slabs.)

The truck was overkill, but it was free so I can't complain! Here are the slabs all loaded and 'secured' in the truck. It took my son and I several hours to load it all up. It took the crew up at IP about 10 minutes to unload it all!


I have to say that my motives were not entirely altruistic - I am hoping to slab up more logs this upcoming winter and I needed to clear out some space in my storage area! My slab pile is moving from a one year rotation to a two year rotation, meaning that I will not be kilning and cleaning any up this fall. What I cut last winter will be processed next fall, clearing space for what I may cut next winter. Phew, that turned out to be complicated!

On to the shelves.

I cut out and fitted a shelf template out of plywood for the five shelves I need to make. The notches complicate things quite a bit, since I will be putting baked in edges on , then elm veneer over them. That way if the shelves are removed the plywood won't be visible.

So the notches need to be cut quite a bit oversized to allow for the bake in and the veneer. The shelves will be nosed with a piece of sapele about 2 1/2" wide on the front edge.

The shelves will be about 13" wide. Ideally there would be about 1 1/2" of sapele on the front, then 11 1/2" of elm veneer for the body of the shelf. This way the sapele edging would be the same width as the front posts of the bookcase. Unfortunately my veneers are not that wide, a kind of glaring planning error on my part.

Anyways I've got all the bake ins cut out of alder. I still need to trim them to size. First though I will spend some time cleaning up the edges of the plywood on the jointer.