Well, Sketchup was a little tricky at first, but I managed to fudge a little here and bump a little there, and finally with one cathartic brain fart, was able to get my poor long-suffering wife’s music bookcase committed to something other than my wavy memory.

Here are the pix, all screen shots.

This picture shows the bookcase in its assembled and exploded states. The exploded state is intended to be a joint study, that is something to help me figure out how to join the pieces together to make the bookcase.

The little wedges in the bottom shelf go through the shelf’s through tenon and is a nod to the Arts & Crafts style. But, I’m not one to follow rules slavishly, so with hard times coming in the form of $4/gallon gas and Florida’s lack of railroad service (the same as is throughout the Deep South), fumed quartersawn white oak will have to give way to riftsawn and plain sawn red oak. It seems, though, you can still do a lot with red oak to bring out its best qualities. Never mind that it is a specie commonly used in home and corporate office furniture.

As I understand it, white oak finds a home almost entirely in the half of the Unted States east of the Missssippi River. The Greene brothers practiced architecture in Southern Californa at the turn of the last century, so they may have been resigned to using wood found mainly in California. Here in Southwest Florida, we have live and laurel oaks; their leaves look more like red than white oak. It’s likely that you won’t find white oak south of the line from Tampa through Orlando and Cape Canaveral. So I feel justified in using red oak for a piece which has a nod or two to the Arts & Crafts style.

The bottom two shelves are viewed in the above picture. The through tenons of the bottom shelf are sandwiched between the upper and lower crosspieces in turned mortised and tenoned into the front and back legs. One thing I’ll have to deal with is the 76 deg. angle of the front legs as I drill the mortises.

Above is the view of the right upper leg joint and the end of a shelf where a sliding dovetail key is routed. The dovetail will actually be slightly tapered to make assembly easier. This bookcase is planned to be a knockdown piece. Perhaps the shelves won’t be glued to the legs. I have a pretty steep angle of 14 deg. for the dovetails, mostly from the angle of the router bit, but it will also make the dovetail stronger in holding together the bookcase. The next picture will give you a closer look at the sliding dovetails so you may see the steepness of the angle.

As you may know, 14 deg. is the complement of 76 deg. I measured for the front legs. I can assure you that was not at all planned, it just happened that way.

And here is the Sketchup file

I had to fudge a little here and bump a little there to get these pix and file onto this site. After this, the shop never looked so easy. And I have been doing folks’ taxes on some form of computer for better than 10 years now. Yep, you guessed it, fudge a little here and bump a little there to get those returns working right.