10 Comments

  1. Is this construction strong and durable, especially if my level of precision doesn’t come close to Paul’s? Everything relies on 6mm deep dadoes under pull force, while someone might fill up the lower shelf with more than 1m of heavy books. And who knows, someone might lean on the lower shelf sideways, or whatever… That can be a lot of pulling and bending for not so many square cm of glued surface.
    In order to be prepared for such scenarios, I think I’d rather add tenons and wedge them.

    Any thoughts on this? Am I being paranoid?

    1. Or you can use sliding dovetails instead of dadoes, that should add a lot more strength! I am making one from black walnut and I am considering using sliding dovetails, since I would love to put at least a book or two on the lover shelf 🙂

      1. Thank you, Katrina and Michal. There is at least one household on this earth where every horizontal surface is quite quickly transformed into a bookshelf by some sort of female magic. I think i’ll go for wedged through tenons. That does not depend on as much precision as sliding dovetails under pulling force and intuitively feels even more solid than screws. I’ll declare the tenon ends a design feature.

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