Vegan Coat Rack…

A goal of mine this year is to make some things for our use.  While I sold many cutting boards, salad servers and spoons last year, we use plastic junk versions ourselves.  I much prefer mine, but at the end of the day, I’d rather sell something I made than keep it for myself.  This attitude unfortunately means although I’m a furniture maker, our house is rather sparse in the furniture department, beds without frames, etc. etc.  Below is a pic of our current coat rack situation.  It’s basically a collection of hooks I had lying around that was added on to this piece of pine the previous owner had used as a coat rack.  surprisingly it was only held onto the wall with a few brad nails…

 

 

yes, that’s a saw… doesn’t everyone keep a saw on their coat rack?  So I had an idea for an antler coat rack, without having to take out a few Bambis….  I designed a new rack using a walnut back with 4 baltic birch “antlers”.

 

The finish is simple boiled linseed oil on the oil, and a few coats of polyurethane on the baltic birch.

 

The “antlers” are attached by a mortise and tenon joint, but I used epoxy to glue them in.  Finally, the whole thing was attached to the wall using some keyhole hangers with screws attached to studs.  Likely a better attachment than the old coat hanger…  I might put up a few of these on Etsy in the future, time will tell.

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Rosewood Studio, Week 4 – Joinery

We studied various types of wood joinery this week.  All were mechanical joints which are held together by their design, although we did glue them as a final step.  The strength that is achievable through some of these joints is truly amazing.

Joints we covered included: dovetail, half blind dove tail, sliding tapered dovetail, mortise and tenon, through tenon, split wedge tenon, fox tail tenon (demo only), bridle joint, dowel joint, and a few others I’m sure I’ve forgotten.  We also made a small raised panel door, similar to what you would see in kitchen cabinets.  The technique used to cut the joints varied from machines (horizontal mortiser, table saw, tenoning jig, router + jig, bandsaw) as well as hand tools (dovetail saw, chisels, hand planes).  Overall I had a fair bit of success with the joints, although I did manage to glue one part of my panel door on backwards.  It looks fine, but the panel is slightly off centre because of the backwards part.

We also spent some time making a shooting board as well as a bench hook.  The bench hook was nothing fancy, however the shooting board (for planing end grain) was made with a removable 45 degree fence so that I could also shoot mitres.  It added a bit of complexity to the build but we had extra time so decided to do it.

As the week wrapped up I also cut the piece of birds eye maple to be used for the drawer front of my shaker table.  It’s a pretty spectacular piece of wood, can’t wait for next week where I get to build my drawer for it!