Leaning Shelves

These shelves were a quick and dirty project I made sometime before 1988.  With a wobble dado blade on my radial arm saw it was easy to cut slots for all the shelves on the side posts. I cut the slots before rounding over the edges of the posts to reduce any blowout consequences of the dado cuts.

Lean Too?

The shelves are 2' wide and 10" deep. The system is 68" tall. Shelves are 18mm thick Baltic Birch plywood. Two screws through each post side hold each shelf in the dado slots.  The screws are countersunk with my intention to eventually cover them with plugs.  At the time I made these shelves I didn't have a plug cutter so that task was put off and obviously forgotten.  They have been in constant use since being made. My current house has several 2' wide wall sections that these shelves have leaned on over the time I've lived here. 

The advantage of leaning shelves with no back legs is that they don't have to deal with tack strips under carpet edges that make conventional shelves tip forward slightly. When the posts lean against a wall the shelves have a 1/2" gap from the wall.  Great for power cords if needed. 

For Scale

What is kept on the shelves has changed over the years though.  The TI994A PC and cassette player with a tape carousel was my first personal PC.  I won it in a drawing from a Target store opening day celebration in 1980. Learning to program it changed the course of my life.  Programs were saved through a modem to audio cassette tapes. A floppy disk file system came later. I still have this computer and all the accessories/programs. It hides in a box that is hidden somewhere in my house. 

Comments encouraged!

4D