A quick project – old school (no power tools)

I have been spending my workshop time over the past few months on organizing and cleaning, and haven’t really built anything in a while. I needed a shelf to store supplies for the chicken coop, had some twice reclaimed pine, and decided to get the hand tools out and build a very quick shelf.

The first step was to mark off the length of the shelf. It is a utility shelf,and I had plenty of room, so I just cut off the ends of the pine board I had.

The wood was already milled, but had cupped a bit. I decided to use it cupped, because it was going to be inside the barn, and I didn’t really want to thin out the boards too much just to get them flat. Plus flattening by hand was more work than I wanted to do this afternoon, and spinning up the jointer would defeat the purpose of a hand tool project.

Next step was to cut a dado in the sides to hold the shelf. I marked the edges of the dado, cut with a hand saw, and used a chisel to get out most of the material.
I then cleaned out the dado with the router plane.
The shelf was assembled using cut nails. One problem with not flattening the boards was that a piece of the shelf support on the far side split off, but it doesn’t impact the functionality of the shelf.
And, shelf installed. I did use screws and a cordless drill diver for this step. Now my pile of supplies is no longer sitting on top of the feed bin (at the bottom of the picture).

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.