It’s been a busy week.  The kittens are taking a lot of time, there’s still plenty to do to clean up from the remodeling and Heather and I took a nice day trip this last weekend (more about that on Sunday).  That hasn’t left much shop time.  Tonight I did manage to get a bit done on my shelving project.  Four of the shelves are ready for installation and I started on the milling the rails for them.  Since my goal is to reduce my lumber pile, I decided to make the rails and doors out of wood recycling from my scrap pile.  The rails are being cut from an old bookcase.  It was  bookcase set I had built about 20 years ago for a different house.  They don’t match the style here and are kind of beat up so time to make something new out of them.

Here are some pictures of the project so far:

The shelves, siting on a shelf, waiting to become real shelves.

One of the old bookcase shelves. Needed to remove the edging.

I got a whole stack of them shelves.

Tools of the recycling trade. You have to break things down and pull out all the old nails. And yes, I still need to buy a metal detector.

The table saw does a nice job of ripping the parts to width.

So there it is – I now have more than enough rails cut to width.  Next step is to cut them to length and mount the slides to the shelves.  The only thing that made me a little worried on this one was that I don’t have a metal detector to scan the wood for hidden nails.  Hitting a nail with the table saw blade would be bad and expensive if I had to replace a blade because of that.  I felt somewhat safe with cutting these shelves up since I knew how they were put together and know where the nails were used.  I want to put doors on the front of the workbench to keep the dust and dirt out.  Still need to figure out how that is going to work.

If you need me – I’ll be in the shop.

Andrew