Fabricating a Steel and Cherry BookshelfPosted by Bendixen Kenny on June 15th, 2021 If this is your first time, seeing me here, welcome we're in madison and welcome to folktopia my daughter's out on her own now and she wanted a shelf for her new apartment. So i jumped in with this project. I went to the local habitat for humanity and picked up some city lumber. It'S a good way for a maker like me to get their hands on some hardwood and try something out. I'M just standing out to get a sense of what things are going to be. Like i'm a novice working with metal, i just have a harbor freight inverter stick welder! I got a thicker wall thickness in the tubes, so it's a little more forgiving to weld as an inexperienced welder. I am trying to grind everything with nice bevels and taking off the mill scale as much as possible. I'M just drilling some holes here where i'm going to attach those cherry wood bookshelves. I don't have an exact location, but i thought it'd be easier to drill those holes now and then deburring [, Music, ], so [ Music ]. So this is like a wood insert that wood thread turned into essentially a bung and the and the bottom of the tube turned into a bung hole. I think that's the proper technical term. Honestly, i think i built and rebuilt this shelf a second time, because i didn't really do it all properly up front just out of inexperience here, it's looking, okay, but part of it is not square, and in this next couple of sections, i'm basically trying to figure Out how i can get it square [, Music, ], [, Music, ], try and engineer a little bookend for this thing and brand just the bottom of the shelf. Ultimately, i don't go with this oak wedge, but rather a ball bearing you'll see it in a minute. My daughter originally was thinking hey. Could we make this portable? Ultimately, i think it's safer to have it just kind of locked in i welded on some tabs initially and then bolted the x frame to those tabs on the back of the shelf. But what i figured out was a i didn't know how to reference anything square, given the flexibility of the steel, but what i figured out is by adding the tabs and the crossbars on the back. It added a bunch of drag surfaces. If you were loading it into a car or truck for instance, so i ground those off and now either the front plane or the back plane of the bookshelf is one single entity that easily slides in and out of a car. So i've been putting it together and taken it apart, a lot trying to see how this thing would function best in the process. I figured that i'd add some leather pads on these shelves, so that, like when you're putting things in and out, it adds like a nice softness to that experience. So, speaking of softness, i added a beeswax orange oil finish. This was sanded up to only about 150. At this point, [ Music ], but ultimately i added an oil-based poly just to give it some durability and a nice richness, [, Music, ] all right. So i came up with this truss system because i had the problem of not being able to easily reference a square surface. And even if i had one angle right like how was i certain that, through the welding process, or just because i've got so many different angles going on that, there wouldn't be some sort of roll or pull at some other point? And it was kind of frustrating. best hammers got the right tools. This is a fireball square with the indexing tabs and that's really what's allowing me to clamp these pieces of flat bar at 90 degrees to each other with no roll. It'S really cool because it's helping me feel like i'm evolving as a craftsperson, i'm giving myself a virtual pad on the back here. I'M welding on this fiberglass blanket clamping one side down indexing it against the other angle. I'Ve got good bevels here ground out. I think i've got the right heat into the stick: welder just tacking it at the top outside corner first and the bottom, and ultimately i'll come back and weld everything home once every other piece of the support structure is tacked into place now, obviously it is coved Era and i ran out of this particular size of metal, metal, flat bar and so the mixed mixed up configuration of those cross members is just because i wanted to use every little bit of scrap that i had around to make this shelf and then kind of Fitting it up, is it going to be square and just putting some tacks in and then i'm drilling holes. So i can reinforce these with bolts and it's nice, because you can feel that it wants to be square like even if it's like cantilevered out and there's just a good sense of progress here and i'm kind of fitting stuff up and admiring how how much better It is now compared to how it was before so we'll get these uh holes drilled for some bolts, and the idea is that i'll keep these shelves tacked only and then, in the event that you really had to do a big move with this, you could just Flex, the the frame and you wouldn't even need a grinder once you removed the bolts, you could separate that that joining piece or you could grind it off no big deal. So i haven't tightened the bolts for the bottom support members. Yet so, there's still a lot of shear in here, but once i tighten those up, it gains a lot of shear strength as well. Then i'll use the threaded inserts on the underside of the cherry shelves to to dial everything in and really clamp things in, and at this point i think gosh, it's it's pretty good. I had ground out the ladder frame so many times that it was pretty much bare steel and i probably could have just clear coated it at that point, but i moved on to driving home the welds but yeah just just driving everything home here. So here i'm working out how to build in a custom bookend, i'm just taking some of the scrap doing some quarter. Twenty threading welding that back on the frame and then adding just the right amount of steel round stock with a threaded ball bearing and that's going to be the sort of rotating adjustable end that you can push books up against [, Music, ], [, Music ]. I could have just clear coated this, but i wanted to try out uh an acid patina and that patina is from the essential sculptor referred by jimmy deresta. They sent it out real fast and wrote me a nice note, which was cool, so you can see it blackening and what i have is probably some some spots that just needed to be um, scotch-brited or cleaned a little bit better. But i ultimately added a coat of polyurethane to the outside steel and wood. Just looks good together, so it's kind of hard to go wrong. I'Ve got the brass leveling feed on there. Of course, this is live edge, so that's kind of part of the design it gave me some flexibility to not be too. You know precise. I did use the standard to give it a very slight micro, bevel kind of chamfer on all the edges pretty flexible. It fits a bunch of different sizes of books, heavy books, boxes and storage. You could put a smart speaker on there if you're new here consider subscribing i've got more videos coming out. I'Ve got a video that i've been working on for a long time that deals with getting the rooftop tent off the tiger. Moth trailer stay safe, let's finish 2020 with some hope for 2021 thanks everybody for tuning in [, Music, ]Like it? Share it! |