Day 1118: drill, baby, drill

On this remarkably mild weekend, we had some time to move the bookcase project to the next, indoor stage. Mostly this consisted of giving everything a good sanding and then drilling out the holes for the connections and shelf pins. This required the use of the specialty drill bits that came with the two Kreg tools. 

Here's the one that clears the hole to attach pieces together.

You can see in the closeup that it has a smaller part of the bit that makes the pilot hole for the actual screw. The wider part clears space for the head of the screws.

Then it was a matter of figuring out where we wanted to put/hide the screws, clamp the pieces in place, and drill the holes. This is the underside of the bottom shelf.

Next we cleared out slots for the shelf pins. We put the center hole in the spot that will make the shelf exactly midway up/down and added options an inch above and below according to the guide.

The two panels on the sides will be bearing a lot of the load--attaching to the legs and top--plus having the pin holes, so those boards look a bit like swiss cheese. The three holes at one end are for screws that will hold the top.

Finally, we decided to get a little fancy. The two shelves are exactly 11 inches, which is the depth of the whole case, so they'll be flush. However, we left the top at its original 11.5 inches width to create a small lip. A squared off lip didn't seem right, so we experimented with the router to see if we could get something better. Here's the edge before:

We used this bit, which creates a 45-degree angle. The round wheel at the top acts as a break. The bit won't go any further once it hits the wood.

However playing with various depths for the router bit create different looks. The shallower/smaller cut on the left happened when we set the bit at a certain height. We got the cut on the right by lowering the bit to 9/16 of an inch. That seemed to be right.

Here's the bit installed at the desired depth.

We used that scrap strip of pine along the top as a brace that would let us keep the router level (rather than tipping away from the board if it wasn't there).

And here's the final result. Now it's onto staining!