/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>2749511
It's great to have this discussion, takes another woodworker to appreciate the design problem I had. All I get from others is '...that's nice', but it was a challenging project. I spent a long time pondering how to do this so that I would achieve the openness and lightness of the design without compromising strength, that is a classic problem. With cabinet work there is frame strength, but not with this design. I considered the first obvious approach of dowels or tenons, and that I work alone, so using a drill press alone with a 2"x52" board would not be easy. If I used dowel/tenons that creates 16 potential points of failure due to racking forces on very weak glued joints with no mechanical strength. I considered using 1/4" threaded rod with a routed channel, like a guitar truss rod, that has great strength (potentially) but get complicated and ugly very quickly. I wanted the pieces of figured maple to be clear on all sides.
This final solution looks complicated but I felt it was the best compromise design that was strong and clean, meaning minimalist with sufficient strength. I glued in the threaded inserts to the shelf, hanger bolts on the uprights, screwed from the top down, I could apply a lot of force and it all holds together, good balance between design and strength, I got 100% of my design goal and 80% of the strength.