I walked into the kitchen the other day to find my wife Sherre working on assembling a pile of plastic pieces. "What's that" I asked. "It's a spice shelf, it looked really cool in the store" she replied. And then I saw the box. It had those four words that strike fear and dread into my heart. "As seen on TV!" I have a long history with ASOTV products. I still shudder when I think back to the "Flowbee" incident, or my experience with the "Guaranteed Dripless Pad Painter" And who could forget the "Sham Wow" Yea like, WOW! I can't believe I paid twenty bucks for a rag. But I know better than to say anything, bit my tongue and walked into the other room.

It wasn't long till moans of frustration brought me back to the kitchen. "What's up" I asked. The shelf looked pretty good from where I stood. " When I loaded the spices onto the shelf it sagged. And with the slick plastic top, every time I shut the door hard, the bottles fall off of the shelf" Sherre sighed. We had a quick discussion and it was decided to send the product back to TV land where it could live out the rest of it's life in a mega-warehouse with others of it's own kind.

We can do better than this!

Step 1: Build

All you need for this build is a two foot square of 1/4" material and about 15 minutes of laser time. The shelf is sized for a cabinet that is 17 5/8" wide X 11 3/16" deep interior dimensions. Our cabinet has a 3/4" deep X 3 1/2" high mounting strip on the bottom of the back side. The shelf design was adjusted to accommodate this.

Simply set your side and back pieces in the cabinet and snap the top shelf on. No glue is required unless your wood is warped. If you need to lock a warped top down, I would suggest a small amount of hot glue in each corner. Do not go crazy, you cannot remove the shelf once it is glued together. It will work as a free standing unit in a larger cabinet, but you will need to glue it together.

Adjusting the size of the shelf would be a great beginner design exercise. I have been using the very friendly free program Inkscape lately, but any program that can use .svg files should work well.

The .set files are included if you are lucky enough to have access to a really cool Full Spectrum Laser like the one we have at Vocademy.

And the best part of this project....... You will never see it on TV!

Make On!

Brett