We milled the shelf base differently from the horizontal shelves and the vertical shelf supports. This is because the base has to be built sturdy as it has to hold a lot of weight.
We had some old growth two by fours that didn’t lend themselves to either a rift or quarter-sawn cut. Instead, I cut them to length and milled them down to a uniform size so that I could glue them together in sections to form the smooth base.
I also glued together the milled pieces for the horizontal shelves. But they still needed planing down to a uniform surface. Given that I had forty shelves, this was a lot of work. The question was would I be better off using an electrical plane or the good old-fashioned smoothing and jointer plane?
After a short episode of a little trial and error, I abandoned the electrical plane in favor for the smoothing and jointer plane. It may have taken me a little longer but the results were superior to the electrical plane.
An alternative to planing is using a belt sander. Well…let’s say that I retired that idea real fast. If you have ever used a belt sander you know why. If you haven’t, be advised that it is real easy to put big gouges into your boards with a belt sander that are almost impossible to repair.
But I did use a random orbital sander to add the finishing touches to the shelves and shelf supports.