curved shelf

LumberJocks page

Pictures of the shelf during construction

It's going to be a year or more before I can start working on the real built-ins for the office. More if Craigslist doesn't somehow manage to cough up a whole bunch of inexpensive cherry and we actually have to buy the lumber for this retail. In the mean-time, I needed some storage for the office, and I've been wanting to do more stuff with sweeping curves, so I decided to take some scrap plywood and a bunch of thin maple that was left over from cutting out the door frames for our kitchen cabinets, and make a shelf with a sweeping curve front edge:

A couple of lessons: First, I don't have enough clamps. In fact, I'll never have enough clamps. Second, it'd probably be a good idea to do the curve first with its own set of jigs, separate from the shelf, and then cut the shelf to fit the curve. This would let me get better alignment between the laminated layers; I had to build a router jig to cut them all flat after the glue-up. Third, I should really do this in smaller sections so I should design for that; the creep that happened while I was bending this left a gap where the two front edge pieces came together, and clamping around those tight curves and such was really something that needed to be done a smaller section at a time.

Oh, and the strips were cut with a circular saw on a rail. This is probably the first time I've ever really wanted a table saw, but I still don't have the room for it.