Scribing a Shelf with Belt Sanders

Video Transcript

Hi, my names Kevin on behalf of Expert Village, and I am going to show you how to scribe a shelf to a wall with a belt sander. What we have here is a piece of scrap the same size as a shelf we are going to put on a wall as a floating shelf. And so, what you have to take into account when doing floating shelves is that walls that appear straight are very, very rarely straight. So what I have done is taken a scribe of the wall, as you can see, starts about one eighth of an inch here, gets a little bit bigger than an eighth and then tapers out down to zero down here. That?s the actual shape of the wall, that I just took a pencil, and ran this down the wall, on this piece. So we're going to do, is to take the belt sander, and belt sand right up to this line and that way what we'll do, is when we get it right where we want it, is to take this template and put it right on the actual shelf and get a flush trim router bit, and trim it to the exact size. That way when we put the shelf on the wall, it will be the exact shape of the wall. Even, though it won't be flat when it goes up against the wall, that?s out of shape like that, it will appear perfectly flat and there won't be any gaps on the sides of the shelves. So we've got our work piece here, which I have clamped up really nice and tight in the in vise here, and so I am going to do, is use hearing and respiratory protection, and belt sand this smooth, up on edge of he belt sander. You just got to be careful to keep it flat, its going to want to lean one side, more than to the other, you just really want to focus on keeping it as flat as possible. And, you can check that with a square, and make sure your staying flat on it. This will tell you if your leaning one way more than the other, and you just want to keep it straight and flat and that way when you go to rout this, it will come out nice and even. We have belt sanded the piece down to the line here, so what we would do from here is go up, double check it on the wall make sure its fitting good, and then from here we clamp or screw this on to the other shelf, flush trim it with a router, and the shelf is ready to be installed.

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