i want to turn these two pallets into shelves and the cool thing about that is
i don't have to entirely dismember them
now i'm going to cut down the middle here the only problem is that cut goes through some nail
those cuts with a dull metal cutting blade were just torture so on the other pallet i
cut much closer to the nails with a circular saw.
And sanding a little bit to avoid splinters
and now ripping down some two by fours and two by sixes to make the frame for the shelves
the way this goes together I'm gonna have posts in the corners
and then these horizontals that go in between and between those will be the pieces of pallet
at first i was going to put double tenons in here but these pieces were too short if i cut two out
of one piece of 2x4 to cut tenons on there so I'm going to use floating tenons instead
so there's going to be two mortises in this part here and then two slots on the end
here and the floating tenon in between i cut the mortises extra along so that the floating tenons
could actually have this sort of extra corner in here for sort of a gusset support
and it's even better if the grain of these tenons actually follows that diagonal so it serves like a
diagonal brace like this so i have to cut these all out of some flat stock marked on there at
an odd angle i got the locations for all my mortises laid out and i'm going to cut these on my
pantorouter using two mortise and tenon templates and these are actually segmented mortise and tenon
templates where you can put together different pieces to make different sized tenon templates
got my 32 slot mortises cut that took about 25 minutes
now i need to cut these slots the same width and spacing in the ends of these pieces
and i'll do that on the pantorouter using the same templates
for just cutting these open-ended slots i swapped out these pieces for open-ended pieces
and that way it's much easier to go from one slot to the other
i'm adding these little blocks to support the shelf decking that i made out of pallets
I don't want to rely on the glue entirely so I'm adding a few brad nails to my joints
here's showing off the stiffness against racking so this shelf half is just
clamped to this post not touching the ground and let's hang out from there
and that's without any bracing so that's just the stiffness of these joints against rocking
and next i have to put the decking between the frames
now with the shelf deck screwed in i get some stiffness going this way but not enough
and those diagonals sure stiffen it up
now i just got to move the shelf to where i need it
here's a before shot of where the shelf is going.
Well, tidying up and filling the shelf took far longer than it makes any sense to film
and with all this open space now the kids have already been writing their toys down here and
it's questionable how much time it takes to build a shelf like that here's another one i built that
i made a video about years ago and by comparison here's one from walmart. It didn't cost very much
was really quick to put together but it's really quite insubstantial compared to the ones i built