A Small Job Gets Big

Sometimes a seemingly little project turns out to have way more steps and stages than you orgianlly thoughts.  In this recent case was I asked to finish 24 shelves for a local customer of mine. He provided the finishing products and I was just supposed to save him time and effort,  Pavlo is a good businessman and a good customer so this is a good situation for both of us.

He recently purchased some wire shelf  units to display his pottery at local shows.  On the box it says the shelves are 18 x 48 inches in size. (this is an outside measurement) He asked me to buy wood and  seal, stain and varnish the wooden shelves to sit on the wire  unit’s shelves.

A job could not  be more straight forward, in theory.

In reality this is the job:

The shelf space in not really 18 x 48,  it is 17 ¼ by 47 ⅜, those are the inside measurements of the shelves, so that is the size the wood shelves need to be.   Pre-fab “pine” shelving comes in 16 or 20 inch widths, not 17 ¼.   

The solution is to buy 16x96 shelf stock and cut it to length, then  a couple  of extra shelves and rip off narrow pieces to be edge glued on to make up the balance of the width.  Then cut all the corners at a 45 degree angle to make room for the section of pipe that is in each corner of the medal shelves. After this is done all the edges have to be broken with a plane and the glue lines sanded. I only have enough clamps to glue up 4 shelves at a time so there is some juggling being done to make maximum use of the time.

Once the shelf is glued and cut up it needs to be sanded, then coated with wood conditioner and then stained, then varnished.

My plan is to get 12 shelves advanced along the process to where I am varnishing all 12 at once  ( three coats) since that will close the shop down totally for at least a day if not two while things dry.

Luckily I am able to do the edge gluing, the 20 inch boards are much more expensive (4 times) than the narrow boards and since they would still need to be shortened and the corners done the added labour of gluing is still cheaper than the wider boards.

When I am done Pavlo will have 24 wooden insert shelves and I will have invested several part days building, gluing and waiting. Unless a person works with their hands or is very observant they would never guess how many things had to be done to get that nice little piece of wood onto the shelf to show off the wonderful pottery