Saturday, September 8, 2012

Shelf brackets - clever carriage bolt holes

I'm making a set of shelves for our dining room.  It's a race between me and 9+ month old Oscar.  Will I finish them, or will he crawl first.  The fate of all our breakable stuff lies in the balance.  As of today, he's winning.


Update:  He won.  The shelves are about 50% finished, he's crawling at about 25% speed.




Here's what the shelf brackets look like:



I'm securing them with carriage bolts, countersunk at the back with nuts.


The bottom ones are quite long, so I didn't want to just use a drill as I don't have a long enough one, and even if I did, getting it to run straight would be problematic.
So I made them out of 2 pieces glued together after cutting a slot in the middle with a 90deg grooving router bit.   


This makes a lovely square hole which fits the head of the carriage bolt perfectly.