Welding a Floating Shelf Bracket
I start making a diy floating shelf and the bracket to support it. I begin by finding the wall studs to mount the floating shelf. The next step is to drill out holes in the wood shelf for the wall bracket to connect to. While drilling the shelf, my drill bit starts chirping / whistling, and I show how to lubricate the drill bit. My drill press vise handle comes lose, so I use teflon tape to tighten the threads. I switch to a longer drill bit so I can create a deeper hole in the shelf.
Transcript:
Planning the Floating Shelf
The wife wants a floating shelf, so we’re going to make a floating shelf. Here’s our piece of wood, it’s going to go right up there like that, and I’m going to make it to where you can’t see the bracket behind the piece of wood.
This usually helps me find the studs, but with this wall, for some reason, it’s not doing anything. So, I had to resort to my second favorite method for finding the studs. This is a rare earth magnet, and I pulled this particular one out of my photography gear.
So I just took the little magnet, ran it over the wall until I could find a drywall screw. There’s one. Feels like there’s some – yeah there’s another one right there. There we go. After I found this stud with the magnet, I measured 16 inches, saw it was 16 on-center, and marked this one. So hopefully, there’s a stud right here, and we’re about to find out. I decided on my vertical height and used a level to transfer it to the other stud.
Now we’re gonna find a stud or have a shitty day. Got our center here, center here, line ’em up together, and we’ll get our offset for the studs. So this stud is right on the edge, this one’s over here, so we’ll cheat it a little bit this way. Okay.
Shelf Materials for the DIY Bracket
This is inch and 1/2 thick, and I’m using inch and 1/4 3/16ths flat bar. So our shelf size is 25 and 3/4 give or take. And this is just gonna go here, we’re just going to chop this off at 25.
I’m going to cut in here real quick and let you know I’ve launched my new website. I release most of my videos in parts, and I do this for a couple different reasons. On my website, you can easily look through my videos sorted out by topics. The url is michaelroachwv.com because I’m too lazy to come up with a name for my channel. Ok, back to cutting that piece of flat bar!
Here I’m applying a cutting wax (Stick-Kut – Alternative) to the bandsaw. This helps lubricate the blade and makes me look like I know what I’m doing. And that’s how you do it! Yup! That was my niece Anyiah and she basically carried me through the last video.
The excess of my flat bar is going into my “shape bin” for use at a latter date. Check out my shop tour video if you want my love and admiration. Then, click on the subscribe button so I can stop saying it in every video. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll get a cut from ad revenue bleep
Drilling the Shelf Board
So here’s the full setup. We got the board clamped up in the drill press. And then, to handle the sawdust, we’ve got this rigid-flex tube, running down, using the vise to hold that, running down to a dust separator, and that is being powered by the shop vac. So, let’s see if we pop a breaker!
And we managed to get through it without tripping the breaker. Now, this isn’t the… ideal vise to use for this kind of thing… but it worked! You’ll notice the drill bit also isn’t very sharp… but, it was sharp enough. I’m holding onto the board to try and reduce the vibrations a little bit.
I have a collection of small drill press vises, but this is one of those rare occasions when taller vise jaws would’ve come in handy. I’m going to insert some 1/2 inch round tube into these holes, and then I’ll weld it to some flat bar, and that will form my wall bracket. That will make a lot more sense in a minute. And my rigged up dust collection really worked out great here! After I inspect my work, I’ll speed up the footage a bit.
And everything went well, until the shelf decided to whistle. I told myself it was fine, but eventually I got annoyed and decided to fix it. Let me share this wonderful sound with you!
I’m not a fan of the tune, so I broke out the cutting wax and applied a touch of lubrication. Now we’re going to finish these holes in record time.
Fixing My Drill Press Vise
The threads on this are really loose, so the vibration caused one of these to come off. So we’re going to fix that, with our good friend Teflon tape.
We’re going to wrap this in reverse. This end is going to be my permanent end that never comes off. On this end we used just a little bit of teflon, so it’s easily removable, and we can come through. Fixed.
I went as far as I could with this 1/2 inch bit. We only got about halfway through our shelf. So I checked my other index, and my cobalt (21 Piece – 14 Piece) is a good inch longer, so now we’re going to switch to this. And I’m just going to hand drill it so I don’t have to worry about setting it all up in the drill press.
And that’s going to do it for part one of my diy floating shelf build! Please drop me some subscribes and like my comments!
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