How to Make a Book Case

Ryan — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 22:32:06 +0000

I have never been one to get terribly worked up about furniture or woodworking in general, but I’ve generally found making things out of wood to be quite enjoyable and rewarding. While my skillz are probably average at best, I can usually hold my own in a shop. I have been wanting a nice book case for awhile, and finally decided I would just try and make one. So in case you were wondering how to make a fairly simple, kind of antique looking book case…. today is your lucky day!

What’s interesting about this book case is not just that I made it, but what I made it out of. There was once a large black walnut tree growing into the side of the house. It was so close that a notch had to be cut in the guttering to make room for the trunk and about half of the branches hung directly over the roof and would keep me up all night long in the late summer because of the loud thuds of the walnuts dropping and rolling down the roof. So as much as it pained me to cut down such a magnificent tree, I felt the tree’s useful life as a feature in the lawn had run it’s course.

With the help of dad, the trunk was taken to a saw mill somewhere south of town and a few months later a bunch of walnut lumber came back and sat in my barn for about a year while I thought of good ways to use the cool wood. When I decided to make a bookcase I felt like it would be a good opportunity to get my feet wet with autocad. Plus, since this was by far the most complex thing i’ve ever built on my own, it would be good to have a nice set of technical drawings to make sure all the sizes work out correctly.

If you want to try to make the same cabinet, you can download my plans in a pdf format. I had no idea what I was doing so they probably suck as far as plans go, but it got the job done for me, with only a few fairly minor design flaws.

Here is the wood in it’s raw form after Jimmy helped me transport it from the barn to the shop. They were extremely rough as you can tell.

I used a planer to smooth the surface of the boards and get them to the correct thickness. Btw the planer is now one of my favorite machines in the shop, mainly because it shoots tons of sawdust everywhere and makes a huge mess. (note the snow shovel in the background)

Here I am using a simple radial arm saw to cut notches into the side pieces for the shelves to sit in.

Once all the pieces were cut, I assembled the body of the cabinet.

The doors and window panes were made out of a bunch of long skinny parts. I also put glass in the doors, but I had trouble with that part and was in a bad mood so I didn’t take any photos of that process.

Once it was all assembled it was ready to be transported home (again with the help of Jimmyjack) where I would put on the finishing touches!

I wanted the cabinet to match the existing woodwork of the staircase, which is also made from walnut. I figured since it’s 130 years old, the finish was likely an old-school type, called shellac, which also happens to be an organic substance. Shellac dries extremely fast and I had trouble deciding if that was a good thing or a bad thing. I found it difficult to keep the finish from looking splotchy in places but that’s probably because I had no idea what I was doing. The shellac did bring out some really sweet grain patterns in the wood though and it was almost a perfect match to the staircase.

Then I attached some magnetic door catches and some plain, but old looking knobs.

There was a lot more in between these steps obviously, but you get the idea. And now I have a pretty sweet book case made from scratch!

Shortleaf » book case

How to Make a Book Case