How to Make a Child's Desk and Shelving, Continued

• They took the standard away, and Donna drilled pilot holes in the locator marks. Ron showed her how to place the drill bit in the center of the marker hole.

• After they repeated the process for each of the standards they were then ready to mount the standards to the wall with lag screws and washers.

• They gave the screws a couple of turns by hand, and then used a socket wrench to tighten them. With the standards up, it was time to go back outdoors to build the shelf brackets.

6. Build shelf brackets:

• The bracket was designed to attach to the standards that they had already put up with a dowel. The shelf would then sit on top of the bracket. The bracket was designed out of three pieces of material, a core on the inside and two skins on the outside.

• The core material was an inch-and-a-half-thick pine, which would be sandwiched in between the skins that were made out of hardboard.

• The brackets were a triangular shape so they would need to cut both the core and the skins to this same shape. To do that, they used the table saw. Ron set the table saw up with an accessory he called a sled, which would slide back and forth and keep their hands safe from the blade.

• They nailed a pre-cut piece of wood for the first of the pine cores directly onto the sled… then ran it alongside the saw blade creating two triangular shaped pieces.

• The sled held the wood at the proper angle and allowed them to keep their hands a safe distance from the blade.

• Next, cut the skins in the same triangular shape. Ron did not want to nail through the hardwood as he did with the core because the nail holes would show. He figured out a clever way to clamp the hard wood in place.

• He positioned the piece of hard wood against the sled, then placed a block of wood on top of the hardwood near the edge where it touched the sled, then placed another block of wood that ran across the sled itself and the block he had just positioned. He ran a screw through the top block and the sled to pinch the hardwood firmly in place.

• They made the first cut.

• Once all of the bracket parts were cut, they assembled them -- first with glue…

• …then with nails.

• They had their first finished bracket.

• Steve and Donna assembled a dozen or so shelf brackets and then a couple of longer brackets that would be used to support the desk.

• There was one more step in completing the brackets. The fins, or tail ends of each bracket needed to have matching holes bored through them in order to slide them over the standard and secure them to the standard with a dowel. It was essential that the two holes lined up exactly.