Paul Sellers Bookcase

Hey all-

My Paul Sellers Bookcase just came out of the clamps today. My daughter does a lot of reading, far more than I ever did at that age (don’t tell her that) – so the bookcase will be for her numerous books of fiction. It will hang against a wall in her room.

Paul’s method for making the housing dados worked very well for me, but a few of my dados came out slightly too tight. I ended up taking one shallow shaving off the bottom face of those shelves (using a moving filister plane) to make them fit. Most of the dados came out perfect, so I felt as if I was doing something right.

I diverged from the DVD plan by adding a half-round to the front of all the shelves and the top and bottom. One bookshelf in the DVD’s cutaways has half-rounds, and I felt it had more of a finished appearance. I deliberately left the half round off the sides of the top and bottom so the corner would be stronger.

Glue-up had some of those moments where the glue “freeze” sets in as your spouse calls on the phone as your fumbling around with your clamps and looking for your hammer at the same time. Paul’s “Don’t Panic” comment came to mind as I used some of his coffee table methods to make the glued joints behave. After a calm “I’ll call you right back”, a loosening a few clamps, a few taps with a wood block and hammer, and things came back together nicely. Everything was square and my wife not offended. 😉

After the clamps were removed, I spotted a few areas of squeeze-out in hard to reach areas, so I spent an hour grinding and sharpening a left and right skew chisel out of a few 1/4″ haggardly chisels that I saved for just an occasion. I had to fit chisel handle to an old Stanley 750 socket chisel and realized that my technique for fitting a chisel handle is very similar to Paul’s method for sharpening a pencil. The skew chisels proved very handy for those inside corners, and should be even more handy when I brave a half-blind dovetail in the future.

Tomorrow I will start the finishing process. Originally I was thinking that I would paint the shelf, which would give me an opportunity to hide some minor imperfections, but my daughter decided that she likes the natural grain. I may just use shellac only. I’ve never finished anything this big with shellac before. Wish me luck.