Saturday, May 1, 2010

Different corbel idea


So the wife asked me if I could make her a "bookshelf".  I think I took the meaning a little to literally, no pun intended.  The plan was to make two channels to bolt three books together as corbels for a shelf.  It seemed easy enough, boy was I wrong.  First mistake I made was drilling the hole in the book without it being clamped down. The book went from an inch and a half thick to about four inches.  With a new book and a clamp it went much better, but a drill press would have made assembly later much nicer.  The idea with the channels was to have two bolts in the legs to support the books and one in the center to attach it to the wall.  The only thing I didn't like about the set up was having to assemble it on the wall, but it was doable.

Bolting the books together was more challenging than I thought it would be.   Books aren't solid. They move in ways that can annoy you more than help you.  Like most people, I've seen lots of movies with hollows carved out of books, guns in bibles, and the like. So I assumed it would be a cake walk to notch these for the bolts and channels.  Yes, I was wrong again.  Three razorblades later, it was done. Not pretty, mind you, but no one will see it anyways.  Once I had everything together for the test, it seemed pretty stable. But I think I'm still going to glue the books closed once it's mounted.   
So the support is done, now only to figure out how to make the shelf out of books. Any thoughts?

2 comments:

Linda Olson said...

Please tell me that the books were nothing that I would want to read and were not OLD enough to collect!!!

Metalbonder said...

Unless you are into old property law, I think we're good. I'm just using old fancy looking text books.