WSBO 2, Assembling the back piece and making the shelf.

After a quick lunch and a cup of tea, I began making the half lapped joints for the back piece.
Since I had made mouldings on the sides of the strips to be used, a little more work than usual was involved.

Normally it is just a question of marking up some square lines and sawing and chiseling the waste out.
Here I had to make some miters too, in order for the moulding to flow around the corner.
A great tool for a task like that is a router plane, but it can also be done just using a chisel. So given my limited tool kit, that is how I did it.

I marked out the depth of the half lap from the front of the strips of wood. That way any inaccuracies will be on the back side where I can easily trim them away with a plane once the glue is dry.

The back piece was then glued together and left to dry.

For the shelf I wanted to make another moulding at the top of the front.
I changed the blade for a large beading, and the result was beyond my expectations. I immediately decided that I could make another beading on the front itself, so that the moulding would look like a 3/4 dowel.
This went OK, but not as good as the last. This is where proper grain orientation is important. the grain in the pallet sides are not completely consistent, so suddenly it was reversed and I had a little bit of tear out.

I then tried to make a smaller beading on the portion that was left, but that totally messed up for my. So I had to change the plane into a rabbet plane and make an attempt of cleaning the mess up.

I cut the shelf to length and managed to get the saw to jump out of the kerf and onto the part to keep. So I shifted the kerf and made the shelf 1/2" shorter.
Then I started thinking about if I could make something interesting for the ends of the shelf too. A beading always look nice, and perhaps this Stanley plane will work really fine going across the grain.
It doesn't work well across the grain, especially not on some softwood from a pallet. Again I had to resort to the solution of shortening the shelf to remove the remnants of the disaster.

Some people learn from mistakes, whether they are made by themselves or by others.
I generally fall into the group that people learn from..

The glued up back piece.

The shortened shelf.