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Bookcase Made With Biscuit Joinery
Bookcase Made With Biscuit Joinery
Bookcase Made With Biscuit Joinery
by Peter S. Turner
A small bookshelf—
This V-shelf bookcase
is made of solid
cherry, joined with
No. 10 biscuits.
F
urniture with few design flourishes grandmother. It’s a small, easy-to-build thickness sander until everything is 1 ⁄2 in.
benefits from wood that has lots of piece whose few design details are quite thick. I prefer a sander because on highly
figure. When I build simple book- simple. For the joinery, I use No. 10 biscuit figured woods, my planer produces tear-
cases like this one, I look for cherry with joints for everything. All the pieces are out. You could, of course, thickness-plane
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bold grain patterns, which I often find ⁄2 in. thick, which gives the bookshelf a the boards, and take care of any blemishes
when sifting through stacks of No. 1 and light and delicate look. with handplanes and scrapers. Once all the
No. 2 common grades. Using lumber with stock has been sanded to 1 ⁄2 in., I rip it to
beautiful figure, selecting and matching all Roughing out all the pieces final width on the tablesaw.
the stock, is really my favorite part of fur- When picking lumber for this project, I se- Using the sliding crosscut sled on my ta-
nituremaking. I modeled this bookshelf af- lect stock that’s at least 7 in. wide, so each blesaw, I cut the sides and shelves to length.
ter one that once belonged to my great half of a V-shelf requires only one plank It’s critical that the shelf components all be
Guides
90°
Cutoff
Hold-down
3°
square and exactly the same length. The Rip one side.
joint between the shelves and ends are A hold-down
what will make or break this piece, so be screwed to the
right guide of
sure your crosscut sled is right on.
the jig keeps the
I taper the sides using a homemade jig on workpiece snug
my tablesaw (see the drawing above). The when sawing.
jig is just a piece of plywood with a few
guides screwed to it at an angle. To use the
jig, I place it flush against the tablesaw’s
fence and nudge the fence toward the
blade until the left side of the jig just touch-
es the blade. I lock the fence, place one of
the sides in the jig and screw a piece of
scrapwood onto the right-side guide to act
as a hold-down. I cut the taper by pushing
the jig along the tablesaw fence (see the
top photo at right).
To cut the opposing taper, I flip the
workpiece on its other face, place the cut-
off against the right edge of the workpiece
Cutting the
and, finally, place a shim the same thick- opposite taper—
ness as my tablesaw blade between the Place a shim the
cutoff and the jig guide (see the photo at thickness of the
right). I make sure all the pieces are snug, sawblade against
attach a hold-down and cut the taper. the right guide,
then the cutoff
and, last, the
Join V-shelves, and shape edges workpiece, which
With all the pieces cut to size, it’s time to is turned over on
join the V-shelves and cut the biscuit slots its other side.
Radius,
Section 8 in.
23 ⁄8 in.
A
Section
A 53 ⁄4 in.
Top V-shelf
67 ⁄8 in.
105 ⁄8 in.
Bottom shelf
60 Fine Woodworking
cutouts, are rounded over leaving a crisp
edge where the roundover meets the edge USE V-SHELVES AS LAYOUT GUIDES
of the board. To get that shape, I set my
router-table fence slightly past the out-
side edge of the pilot bearing on a 1⁄2-in.-
radius roundover bit. I use hold-downs and
featherboards to make sure the stock pass-
es firmly and squarely over the bit. Because
all the stock for this project is 1 ⁄2 in. thick, I
only have to set up once. When all the
edges are machined, I lightly scrape and
sand them to get a fair roundover, being
careful not to soften the edges.
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Assemble the bookcase on end.
Cauls, a squaring jig and backer boards
ensure that the case is clamped tightly
and won’t be marred.
62 Fine Woodworking