plywood and painting for window seat

[dicktill]

My latest dilemma is building the face frame. I'm going to use "Claymark 1x2 Select Pine" for this, and make it beaded with jack miters.

If it's not a high traffic area it should be good. I prefer maple over pine or poplar for face frames in high traffic areas. Pine is easily banged up dented, scratched etc. and starts to look really tired quickly. Good point Tim, hadn't thought of that. It won't be a high traffic area, but maple would be a better choice. I'll see if I can get some.

Bought a pair of router bits from Eagle America to do this. My plan was to route a 1/4" deep by ~3/4" wide dado on the backside of each piece of trim, leaving 3/8" on each side of the dado.

Why? To hide the joint? Yes, and to hide the fact the the front edges of the plywood panels aren't perfectly even. And for the two short vertical strips over the window seat itself, these will stiffen the upper panel because they will "interupt" the horizontal trim pieces. Unusual construction, and I'll have to deal with exposed end grain on the bottom (see the fourth of my earlier drawings, the side view detail).

This is fine for the two main verticals, but the extreme side verticals (that butt up to a wall) will get narrowed from 1-1/2" to 1-1/8"; in other words the dado on the back will really be a rabbet.

This will also make it easier to scribe to.

1) Narrow them down to 1-1/8" so that the top of the trim is flush with the top of the shelf, and makes the dado on the back a rabbet. But this leaves the width of the trim narrower than the mating vertical, and I'm not sure how that will look.

This will look ok.  When a horizontal line is thinner than a vertical line they can appear equal. If you go all the way back to my very original post, the "go by" photo shows them all equal width.

2) Leave them at 1-1/2" with the dado centered; this leaves a 3/8" lip at the front of the shelf.

I don't like this, but you may. Sometimes there is a reason to have a lip on a shelf. Nope, don't like this either.

3) Leave them at 1-1/2" with the dado moved off-center 3/8", so again it is a rabbet and the top of the trim is flush with the top of the shelf ... BUT now the trim protrudes by 3/4" instead of 3/8" on the bottom.

If you want to be on the safe side, I would go with this. My problem with this fairly logical solution is the large protrusion down below each shelf, and hence "wasted height". And if you are sitting on the window seat, you see the 3/8" protrusion of the trim on each of the side panels, but a 3/4" protrusion at the top. Don't know if this is a big deal or not. Actually, now that I think about it, I can limit the 3/4" protrusion to just the area over the window seat: since I'll have a cushion on the window seat itself, a 3/8" lip on the base won't matter, so the three small boxes under the seat would only have a 3/8" protrusion downward. I'm glad we had this chat ...

You may want to mill your shelf edges with the Collins prep router bit  Eek, sounds like a good idea but would be a lot of difficult routing for this newbie now that everything is assembled ...  

Thanks, Dick

Tim

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