Shelves above the driver's seat are installed. The shelf floors have thin floating-floor underlay foam beneath them to prevent rattle, and the remaining shrounds have Australian-Shed-Insulation (silver foiled bubble wrap) industrial double sided taped to the walls. It has an R-insulation-standards-rating of i-have-no-idea and better-than-nothing.
These shelves needed to be built in-place, and could not be pre-assembled externally due to all-the-things. Unfortunately this means lots of exposed joinery; unlike the kitchen cabinet which has zero visible joinery. Fortunately the sliding fronts will cover everything in practice anyhow. I've yet to build those in some fashion that makes them less dull than a flat 3mm panel in a groove... I'll get to it eventually.
The build is entirely out of 7mm pine 3-ply ply with 42x19mm finished pine strips ripped down to 19x19mm (4mm blade waste) because I'm cheap and ripping them down doubles my money distance...
I've sealed the ply with two coats of water based clear satin varnish. Once this 4L can is done, I'll never use water base varnish again. It absolutely must be wiped on with a cotton rag to avoid streaking, and dries impossibly fast even in cold weather. Wiping with a rag results in ludicrously thin coats, and doesn't allow a deep-soak like normal varnish on the 1st coat. I've complained about water based varnish before... There are no singular superior aspects to it other than the imagined easier cleanup. I would speculate it is possibly the better choice for spray applications as flushing clean water through your equipment would be much easier, but dedicated spray guns are a step above my spray-can self. Maybe one day.
Most of the curved formwork was done under estimated tension with some twine in a bow-configuration, wet down, and sun dried. The upper shelf has some relief cuts in the upper canopy to allow forming due to multiple tight bends with flat intermediary steps. These were similarly wet down, formed, and dried. The lower shelf needed to transition from a compound mitred curve to a flat tilted panel at one point in order to regain control of the build; remembering that I needed to assemble the entire thing into the shelf as discrete components...this was exceedingly difficult and I ALMOST flushed the project and started from scratch. You'll see some pics of it below somewhere.
Note that templating each piece was a deep dive into mild insanity. Nothing was symetrical on each side, and I died a little building these shelves. Like the water based varnish, I will never buy another Ford... I'm very glad these shelves are mostly finished as I'm looking forward to building the cabinets above the bed for clothes storage next. These have some mild geometry challenges but are for the most part - just some big boxes.
