Wood US idea

When my mother-in-law asked me to design a DVD-CD storage cabinet, these plans are what I had originally come up with. It turns out she really only needed to store DVD?s, so the plans were scrapped and gave way to the DVD storage cabinet you?ll see elsewhere on the site.

I was bummed that she only wanted a simple shelf, because I had come up with a kinda clever way of locating the adjustable shelves to fit various combinations of CD?s and DVD?s. Although I never had a chance to actually build the original shelf, Im publishing it here for those who might find it useful.
Material There isn?t much to say about materials. It?s designed with the same white melamine as the DVD cabinet, with white PVC edge banding. As with many of the projects youll find here, it could also be built out of plywood or even solid lumber.

I did learn something new about edge banding while designing the DVD-CD storage cabinet and building the DVD shelf. Most of my experience with banding has been operating automatic glue pot edgebanders in a commercial shop. During my very first job in a cabinet shop I also had some exposure to a simple table-top hot air bander, but that?s about it.

Recently I bought a used Virutex hand-held hot air edgebander (apparently the same machine is marketed under the Grizzly brand name). I?m accustomed to high quality PVC edge banding and was quite disappointed to discover that virtually all of the pre-glued edge banding on the market is cheap, lightweight vinyl. No wonder hot air edge banding has such a poor reputation!

I contacted my favorite edge banding supplier, Frama-Tech, and they are able to pre-glue any of their stock PVC colors for a small fee. That?s pretty awesome considering they?re incredible at matching even the most obscure laminate color. Of course my first order of PVC was white for the DVD-CD storage cabinet but it could have been just about any color I wanted.

I?m used to 15/16? edge banding and it worked very well in the Virutex bander. Having a bit of extra width was helpful in making sure it completely covered the edge of the board when my hand wasn?t running very steady. I used a FastCap Quad Pro Trimmer on the edges and a Flush Cut Trimmer for the ends. It went very quickly and you can?t tell the difference between the hand-held bander?s work and that from a $25,000 automatic glue pot bander!

Hardware Other than some small size differences, the major difference between the original DVD-CD storage cabinet and the plain old DVD shelf is in the shelf pin hole location and hardware. Initially, I wanted the CD storage shelf to be configurable for several combinations of CD?s or DVD?s. Regular 32mm system holes don?t always line up nicely for storing items of a real specific size. So I placed holes in a modestly sized cabinet such that the resulting shelf spacing would be a ?perfect? fit for storing CD?s, DVD?s, or VHS cassettes.

In the original design I had figured on using a low profile, concealed shelf support. The main purpose for this was to allow the shelf to be centered on the pin holes rather than sitting above the holes on shelf pins. I also liked the clean look of no exposed shelf supports. This requires slot to be cut in the ends of the shelves to conceal the shelf support.

When I switched to the simple DVD shelf, I also simplified the construction by eliminating the concealed support in favor of an angled steel shelf support. The angled support didn?t require the extra groove in the ends of the shelves, but still centered the shelf on the pin holes. I left the concealed support in the original DVD-CD storage cabinet plans just so you could see a nice alternative method for supporting adjustable shelves.

Drawing File Even though the DVD shelf design turned out nice, I still like this design better. Hopefully you?ll enjoy it too. You can view the drawings by clicking on the link below. If youd like to download a copy to your computer, right click then "save-as". Either way, youll need the Adobe reader to view the file.

View or Download "DVD-CD Storage Cabinet Plans"

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Have to crawl before you can walk and walk before you run and that is how my projects get started. I am preparing to build a media cabinet for my house based on a Pottery Barn design.

From MediaCabinet

The first thing I had to do was get some measurements, which Pottery Barn provides, and then guesstimate how much wood I was going to need. I am not using any plywood, all solid wood, so I will be compensating for wood movement as I go. So, with that, I have procured what I hope to be all the wood I need, but I will probably need more.

From MediaCabinet

From MediaCabinet

The lumber is made up of 12/4, 8/4 and 4/4. The 12/4 will be for the legs and the top (resawn) and the 8/4 will be for book matched doors, rails and stiles and other parts and the 4/4 will be for just about everything else.

So, for the baby steps, it begins with deciding what to use where, which Ive started to do, as well as mill the lumber. Here you can see some of the 12/4 milled for the legs; these will be cut in half to form two legs, four total and a leg in the middle for center support.

From MediaCabinet

Next I needed to resaw some 8/4 to make the rails for the base; Im building the bottom platform before anything else as everything will be based on this dimension. So here I am setup for for the resaw.

From MediaCabinet

And a shot after it has been cut.

From MediaCabinet

This, roughly 6, section will give me all four rails I need for the bottom; two about 57" and two about 18". Next will be milling them to final size and laying out and cutting the tenons. Once I cut the tenons, I will layout for the mortises and begin to fit dry fit everything and move to the next stage. More to come...

Be Safe!

So with starting back to work on my normal job, I havent spent a ton of time this last week on the media cabinet, just a little bit here and there. I was able to do some work on it today. During the week I was able to work on getting the base glued up. Below you can see where I am gluing up the long stretchers. As you can see, I dont have any clamps long enough for this so I had to improvise.

From MediaCabinet

So today I decided to do some more work on the doors; specifically the two outer doors. These doors are 26" tall by 13" wide. As I mentioned in my last post, the center panel is one solid piece of wood. What I worked on today was to mill up the rails and stiles. I am using 2" rails and stiles so once I got them cut and planed I used my matched rail and stile bit to rout the pieces. Here are the individual pieces.

From MediaCabinet

And here they are loosely put together.

From MediaCabinet

Here is one door dry fit, without the center panel obviously.

From MediaCabinet

Next, I took the two center panels and used one of my new vertical raised panel bits and routed the panel profile. Here is a glimpse at the profile.

From MediaCabinet

Here is one door dry fit. Note the chalk marks, this is how I keep track of where each piece goes and how they should be oriented.

From MediaCabinet

Straight on look.

From MediaCabinet

Also note that the I kept the stiles about 1" longer; this is on purpose so I can lay the door flat, make sure the panel is centered for glue up and then trim it to exact length. Here are both doors together.

From MediaCabinet

Well, that is all I was able to get done today really. Next I need to finish gluing the bottom together and then I need to do a little trick to them to re-enforce the mortise and tenon joint. Next, I am also going to turn my attention to the bottom panel and take my card scraper to it to get all the glue off from the glue up and work on flattening any unevenness. Hopefully more on that tomorrow!

Be Safe!