Curvy Book Case

This is my "Curvy Bookcase." To start off with a little about me and my wife, we are not the expert type, when it comes to wood working. More like hobbyist. This project wasn't difficult, but it was a little time consuming and took plenty of patience. No out of the ordinary or special tools needed. I would assume most people have regular wood working tools in your garage. With those, this project can be done. The idea just popped in my head one day, that it would be cool to build something like this. Kind of like Beauty and the beast furniture. Curved wood and no squareness at all, was the goal. Like I said, we do a little wood working as a hobby. Its hard to even get wood cut square most of the time for me!!.

SUPPLIES:

1/8" Bendable thin Plywood for the sides $14.99--https://www.lowes.com/pd/RevolutionPly-5mm-Poplar-...

I purchased this because it was thin and slightly bendable.

1/2" Front and back Plywood $39.99--https://www.lowes.com/pd/Top-Choice-Blondewood-1-2...

(4) 2"x2" x 6' wood. For the inside supports--https://www.lowes.com/pd/Severe-Weather-Common-2-i...

This was really smooth pretty plywood 1/2" thick for the front and back

2--Quarts of paint of your choosing. We bought ours at lowe's on the OOPs paint shelf. It costed $9.00

Paint brush

Paint Roller

Paint tray

Sand paper--80, 120, and 320 grit.

nails for finish nail gun

1 Quart of Bondo--$12.98

TOOLS:

Electric palm sander

Miter saw, skill saw or Radial arm saw

Jig Saw

Bondo spreader

Nail gun

Dremel With sander bit

Clothes iron

I made a rough sketch on paper with estimated dimensions. To get an idea of what wood and supplies I would need to purchase.

I laid out the full sheet of the 1/2" plywood I purchased and hand drew my front and rear design on the plywood. It took several times to get the design exactly the way I wanted it to look. So, if I made any mistakes, I sanded out the pencil mark and redrew, until I was happy with the drawing.

I used my jigsaw to cut out the front and rear panels that I drew on the plywood. These two cut outs should be exactly the same when your done. After cutting them out, you can put them together and sand out whatever bad cuts may be felt or seen.

I chose one of the two pieces I cut out and drew to inside lines I needed to make the shelf openings. I traced along the outside edge where the openings are going to be. I wanted inside walls in each cabinet or shelf hole. To make it look like it had thick walls. Versus, no inside wall which would make it look kind of funny. Plus, the inside walls will hide all the ugly parts you don't want to see. Keep in mind, the 2"x2" board we will be using to hold everything together will be in between the thin 1/8" plywood outer walls and the thin 1/8" inner wall. So with the inner and outer wall, that's a total of 1/4" of thickness. A 2"x2" board is really a little over a 1-3/4"x 1-3/4". So that plus the 1/4" of inner and outer wall is a total of 2" of thickness. When you start to draw the inside openings for the shelf holes, they need to be 2" from the outside. That way when your get everything put together, the inside walls (to make it look thick) will line up. This only goes for the lines on each side, The line at the very top opening that is curved and connecting each line from side to side doesn't need to follow the 2" rule. Neither does the line where your shelves will be. But, make sure your shelf lines are level and straight from side to side.

Now you want to take your 2"x2" boards and cut them all the same length. I wanted my cabinet to be a total of 14" deep. So I cut (25) or so 13" long 2x2's. These will be what holds the front and back together and they will also help with making the sides bend into place.

Once all your 2x2's are cut, with the back panel down flat on our work table work table. We placed them in between the front and back. We placed 3 to 4 of the 2x2's on the sides in between each shelf. We also placed them at angles that matched the curve of the side panels. A few of them, we sanded one corner or edge all the way down where needed to make sure they fit in to make the curves work. The picture shows the very top side of the cabinet with the ceiling of the very top shelf already in place. You Can see how the 2x2's are spread apart at angled to match the curve of the ceiling. We did the same thing with the 2x2's all the way down the sides of the cabinet, curving them to match the curve of the front and back. Also for the 2 inner shelves, the 2x2's hold up the shelves themselves. In the picture showing the whole cabinet, its hard to see but the front and back are now being held together by all the 2x2's

We then measured the width and depth, where we were placing the very bottom shelf and the two inner shelves. We cut those pieces from the 1/2" plywood we had left over from the front and back. We then used the nail gun to put them in place. Each piece should have the same depth measument as the 2x2's you cut. But the width will be different on each, because of the curvature of the sides of the cabinet.

Next we were ready to do the side panels. If you notice, one side toward the bottom has a large hump curve. And the other has a pointed edge. And the hump side is actually a little higher then the point. So, we found several methods to making this 1/8" plywood bend easier on youtube.

1: If you have a table saw or radial arm saw, you can lower or raise your blade where it will cut slices in the side panels you make in the area that you need to bend. This is the way that worked for us. Since our plywood sides were only 1/8" thick, I set my blade to cut out 1/16" slices in the area i wanted to bend the side that would have the hump. For the side that comes to a point, i was able to just cut two side panels that met together and made the point. And don't worry to much about the points coming together perfectly. You can fix minor flaws like that later. So you will want to measure the distance from the very top of the front panel down to the very bottom on the hump side. Make sure when you measure, you follow the curves or you will end up cutting your side panel short. With that measurement as your height of the side panel on the hump side, you will cut your depth or width at 14". This is the length of the 2x2's (13") plus the width of the front and the back (1"). So your side panel will cover the entire cabinet width from side to side. On the side panel that has the pointed edge, we cut 2 panels the same way. Except one panel will be from the very top edge of front panel to the exact spot the side makes the pointed edge. Then you will have a lower piece (much smaller) that will go from the pointed edge down to the floor. We then held our hump side panel in place and started at the bottom corner and used the nail gun to attach the side panel. You will have to place nails to attach your side panels near the edge of the side panel into the side of the front and back panels. In the area where there's not any hard bends, you can spread the nails out to 6"s apart. Where there is hard bends you will need nails about 1" inch apart to help the sides stay in the hard bent areas. If you don't want to cut slices in your panels to make the side panels bend easier, you can also steam the area of the bend and nail in place around the curves or you can try soaking wood in water for about 30 minutes before nailing them in place. Remember, the reason we put so many 2x2's in place every few inch's apart, is so we could have extra surface areas to nail the side panels in place. So when you nail the side panels in, use those inner 2x2's to help bend and curve and hold those side panels bent in place.

Here's a link to a video that shows how to bend the wood.

Next we measured the inside walls to make the inner side walls. These are the panels that make the cabinet look like it has really thick side walls. They also cover all the inner 2x2's that hold everything together. Total, we had 7 inner panels to cut. 6 panels for the sides and on for the top of the very top shelf ( roof, ceiling)Two for each of the three shelves and one for roof of top shelf. They will be the same width as your 2x2's (13") but the lengthwill vary on all 6 panels. You will have to measure out each curve to not cut your panel to short. Then we nailed the inner side panels into the same 2x2's that we nailed the outer side panels into. After nailing them all in place we had all the shelf boxes fully enclosed. Except the roof of the middle and bottom shelf. I ran out of 1/8" plywood, so instead of putting a roof on the middle and bottom shelf, I found a few left over strips of the 1/8" plywood and cut them about two inch's wide. I cut 45 degree angles on each side of the strips opposite of each other. Then i cut them at 13"s long to put in place where one angle cut was flush with the bottom of the middle shelf and the other 45 degree cut was flush on the inner side panel. See pics

Now we had our cabinet fully built and we were ready to start filling in any bad spots before painting. Our goal was to make every joint where shelves met inner side panels to not have any gaps and every nail hole filled . We tried regular wood filler to do this with no luck. So we eventually used bondo to this. Regular wood filler didn't stick very well. Bondo was a lot stronger and better looking then the wood filler. We also filled in the outside pointed edge with bondo to better make the point. Once all gaps and any imperfections are filled with bondo, we sanded everything very good. Especially the inside corners. and joints and side humps of outer panels. We used our palm sander, even the dremel with a sander bit to get in the hard places. This step took the longest of all. Even after painting it, the paint exposed more areas we had to go back and fix. When using the bondo we found that the directions on the can didn't work as good as we wanted it to. You have to add hardener to the bondo (it comes with) but it dries really fast. So we used about half of what it said to use of hardener and it dried just fine. And gave us about double the dry time. We also spread it on with a bondo spreader like seen in pic. One thing we did, was went over the cabinet real well, and marked spots with a pencil that needed bondo. Before mixing any bondo up.

The painting part is the same as anything you paint. Put paint in paint tray, and put roller or brush in paint. Get to painting. We used two different colors. Grey on outside and white inside the inner holes.

Thanks for Reading our first ever INstructable. Hope it was enjoyable or even better--a learning experience!!