Introduction: Adjustable Shelf

About: Hi, my name is Philipp. I am a product designer with specialisation in craftmanships. My passion is building stuff and experiment with materials and how to work with them like noone else has done before. In m…

Hi, my name is Philipp. I am a product designer with specialisation in craftmanships.

My passion is building stuff and experiment with materials and how to work with them like noone else has done
before.

In my free time I love to work with wood, especially building furniture. Unfortunately I don't own a workshop - I just have the opportunity to work in my dad's workshop...but to be honest, he doesn't have many and "good" tools.
Even though I try to make the best out of it.

My dream is to make a living from my own designed and built furniture. So I spent all my money in new tools and books about carpentry, to become better and better.

Sometimes I like to design and built products within a short amount of time. It's challenging and keeps me creative - even though the result and execution is imperfect, I improve my skills a lot and it leads to better ideas and development.

Here you can see one of those fast designed and built products. It is an adjustable shelf which took me about 4 hours from the idea to the finished shelf.

The idea was to create a shelf where you can put and adjust each element wherever you want. Therefore you are able to make one big shelf or some small shelfs. It's your choice!
And here you can see how it's done. Have fun!

Step 1: The Idea

First of all I do some sketches of my design - rough and dirty

Step 2: Materials

List of materials i need for the shelf:

  • wooden board
  • plywood
  • wooden round bar
  • pegs
  • glue

For building the shelf I need these tools:

  • square
  • tape measure
  • cutter
  • pencil
  • drills
  • cordless screwdriwer
  • sandpaper
  • saw
  • hand countersink
  • router

Step 3: Building the Shelf

  1. First of all I need to mark the lines.
  2. Then I need to drill the holes for the pegs. I use the hand countersink for smooth edges.
  3. Afterwards I shape the wooden round bars on 4 sides with the router, cut them to pieces and drill a hole in the center.
  4. In the next step I use the router again to shape the edge of the wood board nicely.
  5. Then I glue the pegs to the board and put the wooden rount bar pieces onto the pegs. But it is important to NOT glue the wooden round bar pieces to the pegs, because these are adjustable.
  6. Next I cut the plywood into pieces.
  7. Last but not least I use sandpaper to make everything smooth.
  8. And done!

All these steps from the idea till the finished shelf were done in less than 4 hours.

With the right tools and more time I think this shelf has the potential
to become a good, simple and affordable piece of furniture.

Step 4: Enjoy

Now it's time to hang up the adjustable shelf, put the plywood pieces in any position as you want and enjoy the shelf :)

I hope you like my idea and that you also want to built it at home - I'd be very glad!

Thank you! ;)