The last part of the project was cutting and attaching the hardboard panels (shelf surfaces and backs). I started by cutting the long hardboard panels to more manageable lengths. At this point, I really wished I owned a track saw, or a good saw guide. I ended up using a guide board and a jigsaw. I used a fine-toothed blade, which produced a clean cut with virtually no kerf loss. As you can see from the cut sheet above, I didn’t have much extra material.

After that, I used my table saw and its fence to cut the panels to their final sizes.

The base panels are simple rectangles, but the shelf panels are notched at the corners to fit around the frame’s corner boards. I cut them with my crosscut saw and FTG blade, making a series of passes to complete each notch. I clamped all the panels and cut them together.

I cut the front notches, then flipped the panels around and repeated the process.

Now the shelf panels were ready to install. Just a few more minutes’ work, and I’d be finished.

Now I discovered the biggest oversight I’d made in this project. The shelves and their notches were sized correctly, but I couldn’t get them into position. In hindsight, it’s obvious that the panels wouldn’t fit, but I just never thought about that possibility. (I was just too focused on the approach of building the skeleton, then adding the skins/panels.) I’m glad I used pocket screws without glue.

I thought I might be able to make the panels slide into place by removing a side brace, but I couldn’t. My wife happened to come outside while I was wrestling with this problem, and she was able, using some kind of advanced extra-dimensional spatial manipulation or witchcraft that’s beyond  my understanding, to make the shelf panel I was working with slide into place. She couldn’t explain how she did it, but she was able to repeat it and do it again with one other shelf. To make the remaining ones fit, I had to remove more bracing.

With that done, I used 1 1/4” long #8 SPAX construction screws to fasten the panels. The screws have ridges underneath their tapered heads that are supposed to cut countersinks as they go in. That didn’t work on the hardboard. I think the threads in the soft pine started pulling out before the ridges could cut the countersinks. I ended up drilling the countersinks separately, then driving the screws, and all was well.