Fundamentals of Cabinet Making Session 7: Edge Band the Shelf
George VondriskaDescription
Shelves are commonly made from man-made materials, which means banding the edge. Learn how you can easily produce a jig for your shop that will allow you to safely rip the skinniest of edge band pieces, with the saw guard in place.
A long time ago it seems we cut pieces and we had one left over that's gonna become the shelf, the adjustable shelf, for inside the cabinet. Now we can play this for this cabinet a couple different ways. I'm gonna show you how to rip a skinny, skinny piece of edge banding that we can apply to the front of the shelf. For this scale of cabinet, it's so small, if you don't want to mess with this you could just cut a piece of solid oak or whatever material you're using and put it inside the cabinet as an adjustable shelf. We just don't want to have this plywood edge show.
Now on a bigger scale, if you're making larger cabinets for your kitchen or your shop, you are gonna want to use man-made materials for all the reasons that we talked about, all the advantages of manmade in which case you're gonna want to master this technique. The technique being, how do we cut a little quarter inch by three quarter inch strip to cover this safely on the table saw? The answer's pretty easy. It's in this sled. What I've got here is a piece of melamine and it doesn't matter what this stuff is but we need a base.
And I want the base to be an even width that's easy for me to work with. 10 inches works out great for my simple brain. At the end of the sled, there's a foot. This is a piece of Masonite hardboard that was glued onto the end. Glued, no staples, 'cause sometimes you cut into it.
You'll see in just a second. Here I took an old push pad where the neoprene had kind of worn out and I screwed that on here to make a handle that I could hold onto. The way this'll work is that I think about what it is I want to make. So in this case, I want to make a quarter inch edge ban. I set the fence on my table saw to this dimension plus the banding I want to produce.
I'm gonna set my fence then to 10 1/4. The way this all comes together is that the sled goes against the fence, the material goes against the sled and I push all of this through as a unit. What's really cool about this is that it lets me leave the guard in place. That's huge. It's a very safe and accurate way to make these skinny pieces.
As you can probably tell from the foot on my sled I've often gone less than a quarter inch. I've produced skinny, skinny, skinny pieces for splines on other projects that are even less than a quarter inch thick. Now for your starter material, in the perfect world, we would like this to be thicker than what it's going on to if I can get this aligned, there we go. That's gonna make your life a little bit easier. If the wood and the plywood shelf are already exactly the same thickness, gluing them together is really fussy.
In the best case scenario, the solid wood you're gonna cut your banding from will be a little bit oversized compared to the shelf. All right, here's how this works. Now, if I had to do more than one it's easy peasy. All I have to do is let the saw run, bring this piece back, go against the sled again, cut another one. Go against the sled again, cut another one.
So it's a really effective way to cut these skinny parts. Now, application. I'm gonna put a piece of scrap on my table saw so that in case some glue drips, I don't get it on the saw. What we need to do is glue that piece we just produced on here. Really important part.
At this stage of the game, this piece that'll be my shelf when it grows up, is not the right size. After the banding is on, then you would go back and do all your final dimension. Talk about that more in a sec. For clamping, one of the easiest ways I've found to do this stuff is just using masking tape. Stay.
Here we go. On with the banding. Now what's cool about masking tape is we can capture the piece, center it, 'cause it's swimming around in the glue, pull the tape, and you can put a surprising amount of tension on good quality masking tape. Checking as I go to make sure I have overhang on both sides. And then the next step is we'll let this glue dry.
Little further along in the project when we're detailing the cabinet out we're gonna come back and look at easy ways to trim that banding to get it perfectly flush with the top and the bottom of the plywood. That takes care of banding our shelves so that we can cover up that ugly plywood edge.
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