I was leaving my apartment one day through the alley way when I noticed a bed frame and some slats tossed by the dumpster. I figured that if they were still there when I come back I would pick them up and figure out something to do with them.
Lo and behold they were still there so I was the proud owner of some trashed bed slats! Interesting pieces of wood – wasn’t quite plywood, but still an engineered laminate of some sort with a nice natural hue to it.
I picked the pieces up on a Wednesday and I tasked myself to figure out what to do with it over a single weekend, which was a nice change of pace compared to my typical project timelines.
After mulling over what to do with the hardware I settled on building a new plant rack for my collection. This was quite a pressing need as my collection had commandeered a sizeable percentage of my dinning table.
The design would be a simple ladder/a-frame shelf and use dowels as the cross beam members. Lots of cutting and drilling but in one weekend I walked away with a new shelf!
Lessons Learned
A few things I learned from this project:
- Forstner bits are great at making holes with smooth walls.
- I had some trouble with tearout from my bits. I tried tape, sacrificial pieces of wood, different RPMs, but nothing helped. In the end I ended up drilling both ways. First was to 75% of the depth, and the remainder done on the other side. I was initially worried about properly aligning the drill axis, but fortunately the forstner bits have a centering bit that allowed me to line things up.
- My tolerancing on this project was very tight. The dowels needed some persuasion going in, I think next time I assemble this I’m going to give the dowels a light sanding to reduce their diameter and introduce a little bit of slop.
Osi Van Dessel 