Switchback Bookshelf

I was looking at bookshelves to build for my daughter’s first apartment and came across this:
Switchback bookcase and showed it to her. She loved it, so I told her when she moved out I’d make it.

Well a few months later she’s out and I reversed the design in Photoshop and Illustrator to make this build. It’s not the same as the proportions of the original, but it worked out good for my project. I had to make some tweaks to the cuts when I finally built it, but overall it fit together just as planned. Never thought that would happen on the first try with this – it looks too crazy to work at all.

I did not do all the fancy dovetails, just 1×10’ – 8 foot pine from HD, it took 5 of them to make this so the whole thing cost about $50. It is a bit tall a just over 6’, so if I were to do it again I’d lose one of the levels. If I do that I might be able to get it down to 4 boards.

Since it was so tall – on the install I screwed in a couple “L” brackets on the top back shelf to hold it to the wall. I cut 10, 20, and 90 degree dados where needed, cutting each angle on all boards with one setup for each degree setting, left all the ends square, sanding them out at the end to match those degrees as needed. Next time I think I’ll need to get one of those angle cube thingies to measure the blade’s degree more precisely, that might help with the final fit also.

The shelves run about 9” deep and its about 18” wide so it fits through doors and into rooms and it’s pretty light made in pine. I’m planning on making a second one to mirror the design and make a matching set where the protruding edges mate up.

I used a gel stain, as I’d heard that helped with pine and the pitch and such, for the base coat of brown, and then went over that with a black stain to match her existing decor, then two topcoats of poly wipe on. She loves it, and so does the cat! :)

-- You cannot build a reputation on what you are going to do. - Henry Ford