How to Build a Bookcase in 2020 | Bookcase building by Norm Abram NYWS

neroli America there were very few books in private homes therefore not much need for bookcases but here at the bank they kept the books right right I bet they knew where every nickel and dime was this is a nice piece a free-standing bookcase with a cornice detail at the top and inside an adjustable shelf feature you thought that was a modern device it appears that the cabinet is built from some pine but if you look at the inside of the door you see that it's pine on the inside and that it has a mahogany veneer on the outside so I suppose today we would build a bookcase like this with plywood how to build my bookcase today I need two and a half sheets of plywood one and a half sheets of three-quarter inch for the sides the top and the bottom as well as the shelves and one sheet of quarter-inch for the back I've chosen birch plywood because the plywood is much more stable than a solid wood might be I'm not going to get any warping or splitting and I've chosen this birch because it's a nice smooth surface it will paint up nicely and you could stain it in fact if you wanted to now it's expensive but not as expensive as good premium pine might be now my home center doesn't offer pre cutting of plywood but some places do you might want to have them make the initial cuts for you right at the lumberyard and I'll save you some time but make sure they do it right because this stuff is still fairly expensive now I'm going to cut mine on my table saw here and I've set the fence up so that it's 24 inches from the RIP fence to the center of the blade that way I'll get two equally wide strips eight feet long because I'm doing it alone I need a little bit of help so I put these rollers in front of the saw and this set up so that they're just a little bit lower than the top of the table saw and they're also perfectly parallel with the front of the saw if they were out of parallel as you push the wood through it might tend to walk off and wonder rection or the other so with those all set up I'm ready to go wish me luck now another thing is that in my shop here I have my workbench behind the slot and it's about the same height as the saw so it helps hold up fly wood what you want to do is make sure that the plywood is tight up against the fence and not out in an angle like this or like this the idea is to keep it perfectly parallel to the fence keep an eye on that as well as the blade and just take your time and push it through all right this is one sheet that's been ripped in half and now I need one more half sheet so I'll rip this one over here you know if you don't have a table saw that rips the 24 inch widths and you can't get your lumberyard to make the initial cuts for you you can think about using a straightedge and just an ordinary circular saw you can do a pretty good job with that but this is really the way to go well now I need two pieces 11 and 3/4 inches for the sides of the bookcase and I'll set my rip fence again making sure to get an accurate measurement between the fence and the saw blade and I'll rip those two pieces from one of my half sheets now for my shelves as you can see the Shelf is just a piece of plywood with the pine nosing and I need to rip the plywood to ten and a half inches let's see if I rip three strips eight feet long that will give me enough material for six shelves set my size to ten and a half next piece that I need is this bottom stationary piece and you'll notice that it's wider than either the sides or the adjustable shelves and in fact it needs to be 12 and 1/8 inches and I'll cut that from my remaining strip here but first I want to cross cut it in half which will be 4 feet okay now I'm going to rip it on the table saw which is already set at 12 emanate now I need a piece for the top up here and that fits between the plywood on the back and the face frame so it needs to be 11 and 3/8 inches and I'll cut that for my remaining strip over here this part of the operation is cutting to length and this is one of two side pieces cut to six foot five and three-eighths this will be the top which is cut to three feet this will be our bottom cut the two foot eleven in the quarter inches while I'm at it I might as well cut my shelves which will be 34 and 3/8 inches with these scrap pieces I can show you how we join the bottom to the sides we'll cut a dado in the side pieces into which we'll just slip our bottom and that's just a regular potato joint which is a very strong connection and we'll do that right over on the table saw now to do this joint I'm using a dado head which I've set to take out a 3/4 inch wide by 3/8 inch deep dado and it's just two blades that are set at angles to one another and I'm going to use my t-square in combination with my rip fence which is something you should never do unless you have this guide block in place without the guide block you stand the chance of bind up and possible kickback of the wood as you push it through the guide block is just a reference so that my data will end up in the right place in this case from the bottom of the side piece to the top of the dado is 5 inches so as I push it through it starts me in the right place but it also gives me clearance here so that I don't have any bind up and possible kickback so now I'm ready to start with one of my side pieces and make that dado cut let me see if I can show you how we're going to join this side to the top because you can't really see it with all our moldings in place what we're going to do is put a rabbit in the top piece and that'll sit over the side pieces like that and we'll do that operation on the table saw also again using the data head and I've set it up so that it'll remove three quarters of an inch by three eighths of an inch and I'll do that to both ends of my top piece the back of the bookcase has this quarter-inch plywood which is recessed into the side panels and the reason for that is is that when you look at the end of the bookcase you don't want to see the edge grain of that plywood so what we have to do is make a rabbet joint in the side panels which will be 3/8 by 3/8 and I'll do that over on the table saw I don't need the t-square anymore but I've put this piece of wood or on the RIP fence to protect my blade from hitting the metal our adjustable shelves are held in place by these shelf standards and clips and I suppose we could just mount the standards right on the surface like this but for a couple minutes extra work by cutting two dedos they'll be recessed and it'll give you that nice clean look the next objective is to join all the pieces together using glue and screws okay with some glue in the dado I'm ready to install the bottom piece and I want to keep it about 3/4 of an inch in front of that side peel to take into account the thickness of the face frame okay the next thing that I have to do is cut this piece of quarter-inch plywood to fit on the back okay with a light bead of glue applied all the way around the back we're ready for the plywood and you want to make sure this bad side is facing up and the good side is down towards the inside of the cabinet just set it down in place and I'll fasten it with these little five penny box nails okay with the back all nailed in place tip it up and clean off any excess glue that might have squeezed through with a damp sponge and I'm ready to start building my face frame now let me show you how this face frame assembly goes together but first I'll take off this crown molding header piece and I can pull off this frame and you can see it's just three pieces of wood to Stiles one on each side and a rail piece across the top and they join together with a half lap joint that's glued and screwed together from the backside now let's start over here with our pieces for our bookcase this is the header piece three feet long four and three-quarters inches wide and I've set up the radial arm saw with the dado cutter in it to remove just enough material to make the half lap joint you a little bit of glue here for our half lap joint and we'll slip them together and make sure they're aligned and just use some small 5/8 inch long screws really just to hold it in place until the glue sets up okay with some glue applied all the way around the edges of the plywood I'm ready to put my assembled face frame on I'll just use some sixpenny finish nails to attach it all the way around the edges all right let's work on the base next I suppose I could glue and nail all these pieces right to the cabinet but if you were going to build one or more of these and join them together to move them around you have to be able to take them apart so you want to have the base piece as well as the headpiece removable now this is just pine and I put a beaded edge along the top of our base just using my router with this beading bit and then I fitted all the pieces with 45 degree miter 's on the corners and then added these glue blocks to the inside with screws to hold everything together so it's nice and rigid now I've got a piece clamped down to my table here five inches wide and about six feet long and that's what I'll need to put the base on our bookcase all right I'm going to do my my Turing right here on the table saw using my t-square but first I'm going to rough cut the pieces with enough extra to do my final fitting so I need two pieces fourteen inches and the piece left over we'll do the front I'm going to bring the pieces right over to the case and block the orientation of my angles and that's just so that I don't get confused because whenever you do mitering it's very easy to cut the angle the wrong way so I'll come back to my saw adjust the blade to 45 degrees for the miter cuts and then we're ready to make the pass let's begin to fit these pieces together check the front piece against the side piece and that fits really well now we're going to hold it firmly in place go across to the other side you just put a little pencil mark where we want the mitre to be it's a good idea to have that just a little bit long because you can always recut it later and then also mark the orientation of the angle now to make this mitre cut my mark is really on the wrong side of the board it's over here and the blade is here so I'll flip it over and using a square just transfer a mark along the back of the board marking it on this side and that will give me a guy to start through the saw blade and again I'm going to cut it a little long because I can always trim it up later before I can make my final check of the fit I have to cut my side pieces to length so I'll just set the front piece on the cabinet and take the side pieces putting the mitered edge down and mark this intersection right here which will give me the correct length and I'll just square cut those and I'm ready to see how well these fit together okay that fits pretty good now I'm ready to glue it up these glue blocks really do a great job at strengthening those corners so some glue on the block itself set it down on a side piece and some glue on the entire mitre and a little more on the block make it fasten it to this front piece okay a few screws and that will hold the base in place the top section of our bookcase may look complicated but in fact it's not that bad it's three pieces of wood a three and five-eighths inch crown molding that I picked up at the lumberyard this angled piece right here that I made on the table saw and a piece of one by five that I've rounded over the edges now the bottom edge was rounded over with a half-inch rounding over bit in the router and to make it a little bit softer on the top edge I'm just going to use a quarter inch rounding over a bit and I'm ready to do that now this little guide allows me to make perfect line screw pockets every time now this top assembly gets fastened to the cabinet with screws okay that takes care of the Bacchus trip for the crown molding and that was just made from piece of inch and 7/8 stock that I beveled at 38 degrees and what it will do is accept the crown molding and in fact will fasten it to that strip at 38 degrees though will vary depending on where you purchase your molding and now our crown molding the final touch not the easiest thing to cut and make nice tight joints first of all you need a miter box not necessarily a power one like this but you do need a miter box and you always set the molding in upside-down what I like to do is simulate what's happening at the cabinet because the molding if it's not set in the box correctly will end up at the wrong angle and that will drastically affect your fits so we'll use a piece of scrap backer and set the molding against it and then clamp this guide strip down and that will simulate what's happening at the cabinet and we'll end up with perfect cuts every time we ever do without this carpenters glue a little bit of glue on the joint and I've already put some one my cleat squeeze it into place fits real good and nail it in place with some small fourpenny finish nails and now for probably the most important part of our bookcases the shelves themselves let me show you how I made those start out with these pieces of plywood and this would be the front edge if we left it unfinished and that's not very good so I took some 1 by 2pi and we'll apply that to the front it'll give it some thickness and also give it some strength and what I did is just round it off the edges using a 3/8 rounding over bit let me show you a little bit of glue my milled front piece put on with some four penny finished nails and that's all there is to making shelves we share a trade secret window whenever I build these bookcases I don't want to install these metal standards until after I've done any painting or staining to the inside of the cabinet believe me it's real difficult to paint around them but once the paint is dry and the standards are in place set those shelves in and you're ready to start enjoying your bookcases

Channel: Les Cizek

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Keywords: how to build a bookcase, how to make a bookshelf, build a bookcase, build a bookshelf, make a bookcase, make a bookshelf, how to make a bookcase, bookcase building, how to build a bookcase for beginners, how to build a bookcase wall unit, how to build a bookshelf, bookcase build, building a bookshelf

Id: XvXLvuc33WA

Length: 23min 38sec (1418 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 05 2014