A simple, baltic birch book shelf.

[michael_schwartz]

This is not my finest work, but with all the talk lately about baltic birch, I thought I would share this.

I made this shelf to test my newly built vacuum hold down table, so this was never a really serious project. I spent about 5 minutes drawing this up in aspire.

The construction is simple, just dado's, rebates, and glue. I started working on this around 8:00 PM that day and took it home with me the same night. 23 minutes of machine time, 10 minutes of design work, and 3 hours to sand, assemble, and finish. $30.00 worth of material.

If I built another, I would change the design somewhat, but it turned out just fine.

Now back to the subject of vacuum hold down. I thought I could cut reasonably clean parts before, but screws and tabs allow parts to vibrate quite a bit. Cutting baltic birch, the edges, are free of chatter, and only need light finish sanding. I have been able to hold parts as small as 4"x4" from a 12x14 blank without anything moving. The central vacuum motors really work well taking into consideration their cost, and relatively low power requirements. There is no reason to rule out vacuum hold down for lack of 3 phase power, or an 8k+ budget.