Day Seven-twenty-one: mystery revealed

Apologies. It's been a touch longer between posts than anticipated. We didn't mean to leave everyone hanging this long. So we'll start with what magicians refer to as the "big reveal". Ok, so this still needs some sanding and painting, but you get the idea.

The shelves are the easy part, it's just a 1x8 of poplar, but the four brackets were a little more involved.

We took the four new brackets that we made with nothing more than our saws and Elmer's wood glue.

And then things got fancy when we broke out the newest addition to the team--a router.

If you read anything online about using routers, a key ingredient is having a hard edge against which to brace the router rather than trying to use it free-hand. So when we built our work table we included such a brace.

If you're wondering about the bolts holding it on, we know there will be times when we want the use of the full table, so the router brace is removable with the help of two butterfly nuts.

The next step was to clamp the bracket firmly in place because with a router bit spinning several thousand times per minute you do not need the wood to shift around. The spacer is 2 inches, just the right length (with some practice) to center the router on the bracket.

The result was four of these. Why cut a channel?

Because we wanted to reuse the hardware that was on the previous brackets. After all it worked fine to hold those up.

And here's the pre-shelf version.