Cutting Lumber Pieces to the Same Width

Video Transcript

"OK, now we're back to our original board to look at the width of the board. Now this is a 1X12 board but of course it's not 12 inches wide, it's 11 and 3/8 inches wide. We are going to need to cut this board down to 11 inches so that all of these boards are the same width. We're making a number of book cases today so they all have to be the same width. So after this has been cut to length at the home store, I bring the boards home and on my table saw I rip them to 11 inches wide. You want to do that with all of your cut pieces at once. Cut them all to eleven inches wide. These shelfs are 25 1/2 inches wide because 3/4's of an inch, the thickness, plus 25 1/2 inches, plus another 3/4's on this end adds up to 27 inches. So whatever the width of your book case is going to finally be, the shelves are always an inch and a half less than the total width of the bookcase. So I've got this all ripped out now and it's cut to the right length, it's ripped to the right width. I've already sanded it a little bit, get the dirt off and everything and make it a nice clean board and now we're ready to start measuring for shelves and measuring for places that we are going to put screw holes."