Cat friendly Bookshelf

Working on an idea for a bookshelf with a path for the cat to be able to climb to the top.

The idea is the cat will be able to climb the book shelf starting at the bottom right climbing up to the left, and the other shelves will be filled with books.

I’ve started building it, but still need to install the shelves. Just waiting on getting them back from the CNC shop.

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Looks great! How are you making your beams? Looks like you’ve got a good process going.

I definitely have the unfair advantage of working with Mikey and Rongomai in New Zealand. So I’ve got good access to the beams Rongomai has been making on the Village Kit machine. I’m not sure if he has posted the machine on here yet, as I can’t find it. I’ll prod him to make a post about it :rofl: It’s pretty cool, It can drill 30 holes at once.

Decided not to go the CNC shop route as it was going to take a week for him to get the plywood and cut the panels, and I didn’t want to wait that long. So I got a sheet of plywood and cut out 14 400mm x 320mm pieces, and made this grid pattern jig to help me align the holes on each panel using a center punch. Once I had the holes marked it was pretty easy to drill them out. Originally there was meant to be 14 panels but one of them got turned into swiss cheese as I made a few mistakes drilling that first panel, But was able to get the rest right :sweat_smile:

Once, I had cut and drilled the holes I attached all the panels.

One problem I realized while building it, was that I had already tightened up the frame, when I assembled it on friday, so putting the panels in started off a bit difficult, but once I started loosening up the area I was working on, it made it much easier to add the panels in. especially in the places where I needed to go through a panel and two beams.

Here’s what the final product looks like with books and Cat.



The build list is pretty simple, There are only two beam sizes and one panel size, and 3 variations of bolt/nut pairs

Beams:

  • 10x 30gu beams (1200mm)
  • 38x 10gu beams (400mm) though I think I could cut out about 6-8 of these and it would have still been really sturdy.

Panels:

  • 13x panels 10gu x 8gu (400mm x 320mm)

Bolts:

  • 76x 2gu furniture bolt/barrel nut pairs (75mm bolt, 12mm barrel nut)
  • 24x 2gu + 12mm panel furniture bolt/barrel nut pairs (75mm bolt, 25mm barrel nut)
  • 32x 1gu + 12mm panel furniture bolt/barrel nut pairs (35mm bolt, 12mm barrel nut)