Bookcase Plans - Make Your Own Bookcase Design
Building a Bookcase
A lot of the bookcase plans on the Web seem more suited to building a family heirloom than building a simple bookcase. The exhaustive details of the design and fine joinery are nice - if you happen to be a woodworker. But for the rest of us - who don't have the skills or the money to set up an expensive woodworking shop - it's a little more tricky to find bookcase plans that make sense. At most, we simply want some extra storage space for books, photo albums, and maybe a few odds and ends. Besides, even the most simple bookcase designs will hold just as many books as the more complicated (and expensive) styles. In other words, we're looking for function over form.
Bookcase Basics
If you choose the right joinery, even the most simple bookcase plan design will hold up to just about any abuse you can give it. Of course, it's all about figuring out how to secure the shelves to the sides of the cabinet - which plays a big part in the overall strength of the bookcase itself. The easiest method is to create a small lip support on each side of the cabinet on which the shelf can rest. The lip can be made from just about any type of scrap wood you have available. Simple glue and screw joinery works fine here to attach the lip to the inner sides of the bookcase (you'll need to do some careful measuring and marking to get the supports even on both sides).
You might also consider using sturdy, dado and groove joints - which are easier to make than you might think. Dadoes and grooves require a woodworking router, though, which will set your budget back around $100 or so (keep in mind that you'll find many more projects to make good use of a new router in your shop). The whole trick to cutting dadoes for a bookcase is knowing how to set up a dado cutting guide - which you can make yourself with a couple pieces of scrap wood from your shop. Once you get the hang of using a dado guide - the world of woodworking will start to make a whole lot more sense to you. Dados and grooves are fundamental to basic woodworking joints - and it's hard to find any kind of furniture that doesn't use some version of this type of wood joinery.
One Sheet of Plywood
If you plan it right, there's no reason why you can't build a bookcase using only one sheet of 3/4 inch plywood. If you've shopped for plywood before, you know that this single item can easily be the budget breaker for a wood project. Keeping your plywood material list at one sheet or less will go a long way in cutting overall costs. Add a few board feet of hardwood lumber and a piece of 1/4" plywood for the back and you've got most of your bookcase materials covered. Bookcase Expansion. The best part about starting simple with your bookcase plans is that you can easily expand the size by simply modifying the basic frame. For example, to create an entire wall of shelves, you can build several copies of the basic bookcase frame, attach the sides together, and then add a revised version of the outer trim to cover the entire width of the bookcase.
