FLW Cabinet - #22 Finishing the Shelves Part 2 & Tops Part 1

Before I get into more work on the shelves the week before last, we went on a little vacation to visit my son in Arkansas.  While there he bought me a 3-piece wood rasp set.  One round, one half-round and one flat.  The half round and the flat did not have a “safe edge” on them.  That’s where one of the narrow side edges is smooth.  I used one of these when working on the inside roundovers on the doors in Post 21.  As an aside to the cabinet project the following is how I put a safe edge on the new rasps.  The top photo below shows how the rasp looked when I got it while the bottom one shows it after the modification.

To remove the teeth from the rasp a grinder is used.  Here you can see how a riser block is clamped to the tool rest so the rasp handle clears its edge.  The tool rest angle is set so the center line of the rasp is aligned with the center of the wheel.  Several light passes removed the teeth but still left a rough surface. 

Polishing the ground surface is done with wet/dry silicon carbide sandpaper, water as a lubricant plus a backer board.  After clamping the rasp in the vice I start with 320 grit using progressively finer grits stopping at 1200 grit paper.  If you think sanding wood can be tedious try hand sanding hardened steel.

With that done I can get back to working on the shelves.

The last step before gluing the edging on is to route a roundover on a couple of the edges.  I have to do it now as after it is glued on there is not room for the bit to clear.  Don’t worry if this does not make sense right now as I will take a photo after the edging is applied to explain it.  Here is the router table setup.  I have already routed the top edge and am ready to start the bottom edge. 

The last thing that needs to be done to the edging is sanding.  They have been taken to 150 grit on the thickness sander but now I am going to finish up with 220 grit.  I start with the flat surfaces and to minimize any rounding due to rocking the sander I do two edge strips spread apart like this.  After the edges I hand sand the roundover smoothing them and blending the arc in as needed.

With the edging ready to go it can be attached to the shelves. Normally for this type of edging the thin pin nails are used to hold the pieces in place until the glue cures.  They are so small they all but disappear in the oak grain.  However, my pin nailer maxes out at 1” long pins and that’s not long enough to hold these pieces in place.  I could use a nail gun that uses larger nails but they are too big to hide.  That means it’s time to drag out a whole arm load of clamps to hold the edging in place while gluing.  As the edging is longer than the finished shelves and the shelf blanks are longer still, I don’t have to worry about matching the end up perfectly.  Close will do fine then when the glue has cured the shelves and edging can be cut to finished length at the same time for a perfect match.  Here’s what it looks like with the back edging is glued on couple shelves.  One note on positioning, the edging is set ever so slightly proud of the plywood shelf.  That’s because the plywood veneer is so thin if it’s higher than the edging odds are you will go through it before the surfaces are even.  Once cured the edging will be brought down flush with the plywood.  As you can see in the photo it takes a lot of clamps (7 per shelf) to hold the edging in its proper position relative to the plywood panel.  That means it takes all 14 of my clamps this size to put one side of edging on two panels so it’s going to take six days to get all the edging glued on.

After the glue cures the shelf is clamped down and a scraper is used to bring the edging flush.

Next is to route a roundover on the edging.  That’s not done earlier because when I scrape the edging some of the roundover will also be removed requiring it to be routed again.

At the beginning of this post I talked about routing some of the oak edging edges before gluing it on.  Here’s the photo that shows why.  There is just not enough clearance between the shelf and the top of the edging for the router bit to work.  The black part below the bearing hits the plywood preventing the cut from being made.

Once all the edging has been applied, leveled and routed they are ready to be cut to the final length.  That’s done with the wide panel cutting sled on the table saw because the shelves are too wide to use the chop saw.  Process is to trim the edging and plywood flush on one end then flip and cut to final length.  The top photo shows the setup for the initial trim and the bottom the final cut to length.

Since I don’t have to have an absolute exact match on shelf length, I can use a pencil mark on the sled for reference.  The mark is on a piece of masking tape so after all the shelves are cut the tape can be removed so the sled doesn’t end up with a whole bunch of marks on it potentially leading to the wrong one being used. 

A little hand sanding to break the cut edges completes the shelf.  Here is one in place in the cabinet.

While waiting for the glue-up of the last of the shelf edging to cure, I started doing some work on the tops.  Back in Post 13 the blanks were completed and set aside until now.  Fortunately, they have remained flat and true. 

With good flat and true blanks I started laying out the bevel that will wrap around both sides and the front.  The back will remain square.  Below are the renderings and my layout marks.  The angle works out to be about 29 degrees and is not going to be easy to do.  It would be easy if the table saw could tilt to 61 degrees but it does not go that far.  I have made cuts like this before on the bandsaw with much smaller pieces.  This one is 17” wide by 40” long by 1¼” thick and weighs 25+ pounds.  That’s a lot of oak to balance on an edge that after the cut is going to only be about 3/8” wide.

After some thought I pulled out my tapering jig.  It consists of three basic pieces: an adjustable fence that sets the taper angle and gets bolted to the base all of which slide under a hold-down that gets clamped to the table saw rip fence.   The top photo shows the jig set up on the table saw while the bottom photo is a closeup view of the hold-down, jig base and the table saw rip fence.

My plan is to remove the adjustable fence and, in its place, bolt a tall fence that the top will be clamped to.  With the top held firmly in place the blade can be tilted 29 degrees and the whole assembly run through the saw while the hold-down keeps everything aligned.  At least that’s the plan.

Next up – Building Tall Fence Sled plus Finishing & Installing the Tops