Today, we're building easy to install floating shelves with wireless LED lights.
We just started the office renovation and I built this eleven drawer
cabinet, which is working out great, but now we need to address the wall.
We've got a big open span here,
so I think three floating shelves is going to work.
Now having those LEDs in there is going to be awesome,
not sure exactly how I'm going to do that, but we'll figure it out.
I'm Brad from FTBT
let's build something awesome.
All right. I'm going to be making these out of three quarter
inch birch plywood, and each of these sheets is going to be able to give me two shelves.
I'm to start breaking down the plywood with my track saw.
We're basically going to be using all the rest of this,
cutting out just a few parts to make the folded miter box.
Here's kind of how this is going to work.
I've cut out a little piece of paper and you'll have a top
on the bottom, a front and then two sides.
And then when they all fold in together, you'll have a nice little floating shelf
and cutting down on the cross cuts first is going to make it the easiest
For the next cuts
I need to adjust the bevel on the track saw and I'm actually going to go past 45
degrees here, so I'm going to go right at 46 and lock it down.
So by setting the saw past 45 degrees,
that means we will have
a tight outside corner and there will be a gap on the inside,
but that will all be hidden.
It'll be a nice place for the glue squeeze out to go as well.
Now I'm going to mark in from each side the depth of my shelf
and these are going to be ten inches because ten inches, about the largest,
you can go and still get two shelves out of one sheet of plywood.
All right, now, we've got that nice bevel down the side here,
and I'm going to do the same exact thing over on the other end.
And then we can start
cutting everything apart and in the end, we'll cut this into smaller pieces
and we'll already have the bevel on it.
We've got bevels on the ends,
and we do have a bevel on the main sheet, but it's the wrong direction.
So now all we have to do is flip the track around and make the same exact cuts,
except with the bevel going into the main board.
All right now, we could just go ahead and use the track saw to cut down the length,
and if you don't have a table saw that works totally fine,
but I'm going to have
a little bit more control on the table saw and I think
it’s going to get a better cut.
So I'm going to move over and do that for the rest of the length cuts.
Now I can take the blade up and tilt it to about 46 degrees
before I do that, I'm going to mark a triangle across these boards
so I can easily put them back together and not get them mixed up.
I can just raise the blade up here.
I'm going to use one of these digital angle finders to set the blade.
These things are really cool because you can just zero them out
right on your table and then attach it to the side of a table saw.
Then I can adjust the tilt of the blade until it gets over
to 45 and a half or 46 degrees.
And these things are awesome. You can pick them up at Woodcraft.
You can pick up all the tools that I use over at Woodcraft.
They're an awesome sponsor of the channel,
and I'll have a link down below in the description to woodcraft.com.
You can go check them out online or visit one of their 70 locations around the US.
Now I can run each panel through on one side
and then flip it around on the other, and I'll have my top and bottoms.
And then we can deal with the middle.
And it’d look a lot cooler if I took the blade guard off,
but I like safety and I hate dust, so it staying on.
Right, now, we've got all of our parts,
I've got three pairs of sides that will match up with three fronts.
And all these have the miter cut on one side and need it on the other side still.
Now this last cut
is going to define the thickness of your shelves
because it will go on the sides and the front.
And you can adjust the thickness as you want,
but obviously you can't go any thinner than an inch and a half
because you have the full plywood top and bottom.
And on all these angled cuts
Make sure you're using your guard and if you are not using your guard.
Make sure you're using a good push stick. Or better yet, do both.
Make sure your hands are protected or away from the blade.
Alright, moment of truth, I’ve not dry-fit these yet,
I figured we'll just do it on camera and see what happens.
What could go wrong?
So I'm going to spin around. And I gathered all my A-parts
because I labeled everything, so that helps out.
Let’s see which way
so are these triangles really help out as well
Ooh, not bad. Not bad at all.
Oop, I almost dropped it.
I think that's gonna do!
Well, I just got done recording a whole thing and assembling this.
And I'll tell you what, it did not turn out as I had planned.
“...what could go wrong?”
Definitely coming untaped.
No!
That is not how to do it.
*sigh*
It shouldn't be this hard.
Now I've done this in the past using packing tape, and it's worked great.
But I use this new tape that I've had and it doesn't have as strong
as of an adhesive.
So it's just all coming up and not holding it well at all.
And I had a horrible time flipping it over because everything was coming off,
so I went out and grabbed some filament tape and this is very different.
This has the actual reinforcement inside there, and it's a little bit
more flexible. I actually,
got this tip from Spencer Lewis of Insider Carpentry.
He's got a great video on floating shelf installs
in all kinds of tips. He's awesome. Go check him out.
I was trying to find other tapes that people used,
and I found this video is very helpful.
So I'm going to unwind this and put some of this new filament tape on there,
and hopefully we'll be in business.
And with a stronger tape, this should fold over a lot easier as well.
Oh, yeah, that's how it's supposed to work.
All right. This looks awesome now the top edge is almost perfect.
Yes, it is.
There's some little gaps on the bottom, but that's OK.
We can seal those up before I glue it, though.
So these are spacers I cut over on the table saw and I made them
to the exact width of inside so that it could be at 90 degrees.
I cut these to size
so that there's about two inches in the back,
and that will allow us to have the mounting hardware in there
and not cause any interference with the support blocking.
Now I can just make sure the joints are all clean, put some glue
on the bracing, as well as the miters, and I'll fold it up and tape it in place.
Alright, I'm gonna flip it over and check out the front corners,
see how things are coming together, that looks pretty good.
Now, another tip I got from Spencer was to burnish the corners
while the glue is still wet, so I'm just lightly
rolling over the corners to close any gaps
and that way, and the glue will dry everything nice and tight.
And you won't have any issues closing them up when the glue is dry.
I flipped it back down and if I cut everything right
and assembled it, these edge pieces should fit in like butter.
Oh yes. We'll put that on a roll
because it's butter.
All right, I can set this aside to dry overnight and come back tomorrow.
All right. Next day let’s see how these miters turned out.
Oooh, that is looking good, there are a few little gaps.
Now, there are a few little gaps
I'm just going to try to close those up with the screwdriver
That almost disappears and with some finish on there
you won't be able to tell.
Now we're going to go over
and start working on the LEDs before we do finish sanding.
All right, LED down lighting is just cool. I think it's awesome.
I wanted this to be completely wireless so I could run it off of a USB battery pack
and then have a remote control to control it.
Some of them also have Bluetooth and apps and things like that,
but those take a little bit more power typically.
So this is a cheapo version I bought just to see how it looked.
This only has 80 LEDs in the total five meter length or 16.4 feet, versus
this little more expensive variety that has 300 per five meters.
So this one's going to have
four times more LEDs than this one, and this one gives a lot truer color.
I'll have a link down below to both of these,
but here's what they look like just to show you a little comparison.
So these are both running off the battery packs.
This is the cheaper version with the 80 lights per five meters,
and this is supposed to be white and it's definitely a blue tinge.
So it's not a very nice light at all, and they're very spread out
Versus this one, which has 300 per five meters, check this out.
And this all looks way better.
It's got a lot more pixel density. The white actually looks
white versus blue, and this is just a much better product.
Both of these run off of remotes, and they have different types of modes
that you can use.
And whenever you buy, make sure you get RF radio frequency
versus infrared because it doesn't need a direct line of sight to control it.
And the one downside to what I'm specifically using,
I already had the lights, so I just bought a controller.
So it's kind of a bunch of different pieces you have to piece together.
But I love playing around with electronics, so I have fun doing it.
If that's not your thing, buy it all in one kit.
I don't know. Do you guys like electronics?
Let me know down in the comments because I really like it.
I want to do more electronics, LEDs and kind of fun stuff in my projects
and to make a recess for this little aluminum U-channel
I'm going to put together a quick jig.
I used the offcuts from those very first cuts
on pieces of plywood, and I cut them down to three inches
because I want the lighting three inches from the back of the Strip.
Now all I'm going to do is put this in between them.
Now I can just C.A. glue on the end cap here, spray a little accelerator on there.
We'll do the same on the other end.
All right, that will work.
I did a couple of test cuts with the jig and I found the depth that I need.
And this is going to fit in there nice and flush with the surface.
So now I can cut the channels in the shelves.
The grooves are in place for the aluminum channel,
but now I need to make some holes
in the channel as well as the bottom of the shelf for the LEDs.
There's going to be little connectors that go in to hide
all the electronics and still connect to the strips on the outside.
I'm going to add a couple of really cool things to this to make
it completely wireless and rechargeable, but I'm waiting on Amazon to deliver it.
So in the meantime, I'm going to go ahead and clean this all up.
I'm going to use a card scraper to get off
most of the glue
card scrapers are great
because you can really control how much you're taking off
and you won't burn through it like you do with sandpaper sometimes.
After that, I'm going to put on a few layers of Halcyon Clear from Total Boat
and get this thing finished up, and by that time
hopefully the truck shows up and then I can wire everything together.
To make the mountain cleats for the shelves, I'm
going to use the off cut piece that I had from the rest of that plywood.
I'm going to cut it into some strips and then assemble.
I've got all my parts here, and I'm
just going to be
basically stacking these together and then having little pieces on the edge
so that the back ends up being a double thick layer
and everything is going to be glued or nailed together
and give it a lot of strength to hold up the shelves.
The Amazon guy finally showed up and I got a switch and a charging cable.
We've got a battery
which has a USB powered adapter that goes into the controller into the LED.
And this works great.
The problem, though, is because it's RF, it's always listening, meaning it's
always draining the battery so you can see the light is on even when it's off.
But the switch is going be the secret that's going to help
the battery from draining when it's just not being used.
So I'm going to wire this into the power cable,
but eventually I will need to recharge it.
So I'm going to use this extension cable so that I can charge the battery
from outside of the shelf.
I will just put this right into the bottom of the shelf
and then connect the inner part into the battery.
And that way I can plug in and charge the battery.
I mean, get all this stuff wired up and then we'll be ready for install.
All right, let’s test this out.
*cackles*
Yes! Oh, it works.
All right, this is looking great.
The button is working, and now I am ready to install these, but
I grabbed the cleat just to take a little look.
I did not factor this in at all.
And this runs directly into the button and into where the power
charger is going to be. So I'm going to have to cut this one down.
But for the other two, I will adjust it
and move the buttons closer to the front edge.
You know, we almost got out of it, but #MistakesWereMade.
I'm going to wrap all these up and then install inside.
I got the brackets up and using a six or
seven foot level is a lot better than using a four foot level to do that.
So now all I have to do is fit these on there
and hopefully they didn't bow too much and they'll go right on
All right, this fits great.
I’ll put the rest up, and we'll be done.
Let's see if they work.
Oh, yeah, that's nice.
If you want, check out the rest of the office makeover,
I have a playlist cued up for you right there.
If you're not subscribed already, we'd love to have you
as part of the team and a big “thank you” to all those folks
that are part of the FTBT Builders Club.
Until next time, guys get out there and build something awesome.