Pre-woodworking exercise

After far too many months, I'm finally getting around to building some bookcases to reshelve my library. Since we moved into our current house, I've been planning to build wall-to-wall bookcases in my office. It's been way too long, so I finally got started on the task today.

As with so many other jobs, before I could actually do anything on the job itself, I had to do a fair bit of prep work. In my case, the new truck counts as part of the prep work: I can haul sheets of plywood without having to arrange delivery from the lumber mill or home centre. I bought five sheets of red oak plywood yesterday and carried them home in the truck (with some help from Victor). That was stage one.

Stage two was to break the panels down into a size that could fit down our basement stairs. I guess there aren't a lot of modern houses built with a straight run down the basement stairs, because we haven't seen one yet. Every house we looked at had at least one 90 degree turn in the basement stairs. You can't reasonably expect to get a 4x8 sheet of plywood down most stairs without at least running the risk of collateral damage to the surroundings.

Actually, I mislead . . . the real stage two was coming up with cutting plans for the plywood to minimize the waste of materials. That took up most of my morning: I'm not a visual thinker, so it takes me several times as long as most woodworkers to come up with relatively simple designs.

Step three, cutting the panels down to size required me to also come up with some sort of method of supporting the 4x8 sheets while I was cutting 'em: there are few things more likely to ruin your day than having a panel collapse under you while you're running a circular saw!

Photos in the extended entry.

This is a bit of a Rube Goldberg, as panel cutters go, but it worked for me. The key was finding ways of using up some of the miscellaneous bits of wood that are currently lying around not earning their keep. The long horizontal members are what are known in the model railroading community as "L-girders", 1x4 with a 1x2 glued to the end as a girder web. It looks a bit funky, but it's quite strong.		Between the girders, I recycled some frame pieces from an old wooden bed, arranging them in a ladder to keep the girders approximately parallel. The ladder sits on top of a pair of sawhorses, clamped to the crossbar of the sawhorses. The odd-looking pads attached to the crossbars are just off-cuts of 2x4 lumber, aligned to the top of the girders.

The result, which worked for me today, is that the plywood sheet is lowered down onto the panel cutting table, and there is enough support for both the main sheet and the off-cut sheets, so that they don't fall down, or pinch the saw blade, or do anything except stay where they're supposed to stay. I used a home-made circular saw guide to cut relatively straight lines (these panels will still need to be trued-up on the table saw, but my table saw is in the basement).

Step four was relatively easy: moving the panels downstairs to the table saw. It's amazing how little five sheets of plywood break down into:

Obviously, there's still lots of work left to be done, but it does feel good to actually be making some progress for a change!