Here we are, stuck with yet another weekend of abysmal, snowy, rainy, windy, freezing, stormy, rotten, horrific weather. You can tell I am holding back on my real feelings about it because all of those words have more than four letters in them. Anyway, making lemonade, I took Saturday morning off and did my very first puttering project in my new basement shop. Here is the result:
The shelf is the project.
It is made out of “found materials” that I had stuffed into the POD instead of throwing them out as I should have. The plywood is old, and was used waaaay back as a tri-fold for a National History Day presentation when somebody was in high school….. mentioning no names…. no, it wasn’t me because when I was in high school there wasn’t any history yet, much less plywood.
The shelf is flimsy because it is made out of 1/2″ plywood instead of the more sturdy 3/4″ ply, which is what I should have used. But 1/2″ ply is what I had, so I used it.
And while I was doing this project I learned some things.
Did you know that 1/2″ plywood is only 7/16″ thick? Yeah. It is. I measured it when I was cutting the dadoes for the shelf. The dadoes have to be the same size as the thickness of the boards.
I think that maybe the government has taxed away some of the wood. For example, you can figure out that 1/16″ is 0.0625″, so from that you can calculate that 0.0625 / 0.5 = 0.125, which is a 12.5% wood tax. That number looks suspiciously like the Massachusetts tax on out-of-state bank accounts, doesn’t it? This wood was obviously made out-of-state. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Or maybe it is simply like coffee, where a “pound” of coffee now has 11.5 ounces in it. There are so many possibilities for conspiracies that it is difficult to choose one.
Anyway, figuring that 7/16″ = 0.4375″, I cut the dadoes with a 12 mm iron, and 12 mm = 0.4724395″, which is a little large , but it left a bit of extra space (0.0349395″ to be exact, but who’s counting?) for warped boards and tearout etc. and the wood is junk anyway so who cares? “Measure it with a micrometer, mark it with chalk, and cut it with an axe“. The shelf is still standing a whole day later.
What’s that noise?