Coat Rack Pt.2

My full attention this week belonged to the coat rack. Nothing very special, but things like stop cut recesses, making dowels and working precisely without damaging anything.

The bridle joints cut and fitted, the first stage of building the basic frame is done. It's dead square and I'm lucky about how it came out.

Dry fitted frame

In the next stage the frame will get a recess to receive the braid. Therefore I've scribed the layout lines with a cutting gauge (and darkened it with a pencil for better visibility).

The recess laid out

Now the recess had to be cut. That's an easy task on the short pieces. Just grabbing the rebate plane and pushing trough.

But for the longer pieces I had to make some stop cuts. My first approach was to use the rebate plane too. Taking out the waste material as much as I could plane and then chiseling out the material at both ends of the rebate. That kinda worked....

Making stop cuts

I found it awkward. So I decided to try another method for the next recess. This time I've tried to chisel out the bulk of the waste along the whole recess.

Chopping out the waste

A couple of moments later

That done I've switched to the router plane to finish it. For the sake of completeness I have to mention that I have attached a fence to the router so that I could do shavings in a consistent distance.

Routing out the rest of the waste

That worked incredibly fast in comparison to my first attempt. Last touch was to pare down the tiny wall with a wide and good sharp chisel.

Stopped recesses done

It came out not bad at all, I think.

The frame is close to complete. Just one delicate detail. The original version has got a round dowel crosswise the frame. Now, unfortunately I could not get ready to use dowels in Alder. Two alternatives then; using Beech dowels or making some dowels by myself. I decided for the latter one.

Dowel making setup

Not having a dowel cutter I have used a washer for making the dowel. I've cut a square piece of wood. Pre-shaped it with the spoke shave and then drove it through the hole. Finally I finished the dowel with sandpaper.

My experience with this - It's a lot of effort for a not really consistent result. Maybe I'm lacking some experience in making dowels. Or simply a better tool. Anyway. Because it was so much fun I decided to change the design of the rack a little bit and to have two dowels across. Finally the complete frame looks like this now.....

The final result - Frame done

And glued together...

Glue up

The frame ready,  a good portion of the project is done. Now it is just refining the shape and mounting it to a back board.

That was my last week in working wood. I am thinking about whether or not I have more insights to share.

I've already found and bought the right material to put into the coat rack frame. Thinking about the attachment. Had some proposals in one of the last post comments. Taking that into account.

Another thought accompanying me since a few weeks is, how to pack my wooden planes when we will move. The reason for this is, that we will move into a brand new built apartment house. That means pretty high humidity in the basement for the first couple of weeks if not month. How can I properly store my tools there? Actually I'm planning to pack them into plastic boxes which can be closed tight(ish). Hope that works. Any experiences on that?

Have a good week and stay tuned!

Stefan