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).
