Day 2: Support and Cross Pieces

This weekend was a bit of a disappointment. The Giants lost (damn Bears), I was finally kicked out of my NFL suicide pool with only 5 people left (damn Patroits) and my fantasy team (The Vampire Slayers) got killed too. To top it all off, I didn't make as much progress on Bella's Arcade as I had hoped. I spent about 8 hours total working on it but nothing major got done. It is nice to get a lot of the "grunt work" out of the way though.

The first task that I completed was finally installing the wooden support strips on both cabinet sides. This proved to be much more difficult than I had originally anticipated because you have to make sure that the wooden strips on one side are lined up exactly with their counterparts on the other cabinet side otherwise the shelves won't be level. To attach each strip I used a combination of wood glue and #8 wood screws (1-1/4"). I put a very light amount of glue on the wood strip only (there was almost zero squeeze out) and then carefully clamped it in place making sure the edge of the wood strip was exactly on the edge of the pencil line I laid out on the cabinet side. Then, depending on the length of the wood strip, I predrilled 2 or 3 holes with a 1/8" drill bit and then screwed the strips into the MDF.




Tips:
1. Make sure the bit is no more than 1-1/4" from the collet on your drill so you don't go all the way through the MDF when predrilling.
2. Double and triple check the alignment of the wood strips - it is vital that they are as even as possible on both cabinet sides.
3. Go slowly - this part is very tedious and very boring. If you rush you are more likely to make a stupid mistake.

Thanks for looking!!