Drill adj shelf bottom for shelf pin

[Daren LaBranche]

Is it possible to have adjustable shelves drilled on the bottom face for this shelf pin? If so, could you please tell me how? Thank you.

[Forrest Chapman]

You will have to do it as a part edit and then constrain them in Constraint manager.

Forrest

[Brad McIntosh]

Sometime ago, I believe someone had asked about small slots in the bottom that would correspond to the pins - in order to keep the shelves from sliding forwards AND to conceal the pins.

Perhaps a special KD pattern could both of these things?

[Daren LaBranche]

Thanks for your reply Forrest, but I need something a wee-bit less time consuming and a whole lot more dynamic than that I'm afraid. I'm not interested in creating 4 statically located holes on each a/s manually. They need to dynamically align with the holes in the gables (in/out).

Is there any way to do this with KD fittings?

[Daren LaBranche]

I just did a search and can't find anything on that Brad. I don't know how to get the KD pattern to attach to adj shelves, but I'm thinking if I could, it might work.

[Jeremy Schiffer]

Use a fixed shelf, set the left and right insets to 1/8" or however much clearance you need to clear the shelf pins. Set the joinery to KD/RTA for the shelf, and you will need to modify or create a new KD/RTA hole pattern that matches what you need.

See the attached picture. You would change the large hole in this pattern to 5mm. I would think that you could probably even have extra holes in the hole pattern to create a row of adjustable shelf holes.

[Mark Hesketh]

I believe that you would have to build your cabinet with "fixed shelves" acting as adjustable shelves in order to get the kd holes to work... problem is that it won't give you the bank of shelf holes any more, just one... or it will give you a bank of holes that can only run up from the shelf instead of centering the shelf in the bank. Tried this a couple of years ago and that was where I ran into trouble. Haven't gone back to it since.

Would love to find a solution that works / works better if anyone has one

[Forrest Chapman]

You can do this with an rta joint that has 5 holes instead of 1.

Forrest

[Forrest Chapman]

Scratch that, it doesn't work.

Forrest

[Jeremy Schiffer]

Add a phantom adjustable shelf with the required number of shelf holes up, and zero down. Or vice-versa. Then you are free to add as many "fixed" shelves as you wish, and each one will already have the holes in it. It really couldn't be simpler, unless a specific option in the shelf editor was added to accommodate these kinds of shelf pins.

[Mark Hesketh]

That works fine if you are full-line boring your gables, but it's a bit more tricky and cumbersome to adjust sizes if you are going for a shorter bank of holes for each shelf.

[Mark Hesketh]

and it still does not associate the hole in the shelf to the holes in the gables... could easily end up adjusting one and forgetting the other

[Brad McIntosh]

I knew if I spouted something about using a KD pattern that the smarties like Jeremy would come out with the process.

Hopefully the extra holes in the modified KD pattern (2 above and 2 below) will work.

With a "phantom shelf" adding the line boring, you would have to make sure the positioning was maintained (by also adjusting the "phantom" adjustable shelf) if the hybrid (fixed with KD) shelf depth changed. With the fixed shelf/KD solution, the related operations shift automatically since the pattern is all linked.

The only thing I can see as causing an issue will be that -
Since (if I am not mistaken) a fixed shelf defines a "opening", you will have to define the doors FIRST and then added these fixed/adjustable hybrid shelves afterwards.

** I think that we had suggested a while ago that perhaps an option could be made that if a fixed shelf had a front inset, that it would then NOT be considered as defining an opening. (Might be an idea for the 6.1 release??? )

[Daren LaBranche]

I appreciate all the feedback & ideas guys. I'm sure this info will help others with similar problems.

The one thing I've realized with this app is that often lets us do what we need to do by using some kind of work-arournd, but it's often very time & labour intensive & the result is (in my opinion) far from ideal. In my experience the result is often a cabinet that has SOME parts that are no longer dynamic & then requires me to remember which items were customized & how. I don't like the idea of having a cabinet that has 'special rules' to be able to use it. I have a hard enough time remembering all the settings in this app, let alone worrying that I might someday modify or re-use one of these 'special' cabinets in another job & forget to adjust something that was static. I believe there's already too many areas of eCabs that require too much time & very careful attention detail to minimize the possibility of costly production errors without me adding another one.

So given the amount of work involved & opportunity for problems (that I see) with this issue, I think I'll simply build a shop jig & manually drill 5mm holes in the adjustable shelves for these pins.

Cheers