Oak shelf for our living room

We wanted to have a custom size shelf in our living room as an eye catcher and storage mainly for child books often read by our daughter. It should stand on high legs to give room for toy boxes below.

As an eye catcher I decided to go for half-blind dovetails. To get them done in a good quality I made use of a Sauter FD600 trim guide system. It takes some time to properly adjust everything but then it's pretty easy to get solid results.

After drilling holes in a 32mm raster I glued up the outer parts. The dovetails fit was pretty tight. Also the temperature and humidity dropped significantly during that build making the wood bend a bit. That made it pretty hard to get the pieces together. I had to use a lot of clamping power. But eventually I succeeded. In hindsight I should have had less time between trimming the dovetails and gluing them up. And also the fit should have been a bit more loose. But in the end it worked.

The next task was to make the middle board that should come with a dovetail as well to stabilise the construction against wood movement. While making the groove was pretty easy it took me a while to get the dovetail shape right on the board. What worked for me was using my router with an edge guide and moving it over the edge of the board while it was fixed on the workbench flush with the front face of the bench. This way I could use the bench as a surface extension to prevent the router from tilting. That worked well.

Materials

Legs: https://superfront.com/de/moebelfuesse/leg-slender-high-brass

Oil finish: https://www.osmo.de/en/finishes/interior-finishes/finishes-for-kitchen-worktops/topoil/ (with matte white colour)