A New Wine Rack, Part 1

This project started with a tracing - you know, tracing the shape of something onto paper. I was visiting my friend Sydne, and noticed her wine rack. I've been wanting to build one, but just couldn't get started. Looking at hers, I realized the design of the actual rack that held the bottles was exactly what I wanted. Basically, the bottles sit close together on two horizontal pieces, with different-sized cuts front and back to hold the bottom and the neck of the bottle.

I asked for a pad and pencil, and traced the shape of both rails, and made a couple of notes about size, distance apart, etc. - enough that I could duplicate the layout in my design:

So yesterday, I decided to try to figure this out. I wanted my design to be wider and hold more bottles. Also, I needed to figure out how to duplicate those curved cuts for the bottles. Basically by trial and error, I determined that the curves were half an inch deep, and were an arc from a larger circle. I finally settled on 2 inches as the radius for the bigger cut, and 5/8" as the radius of the smaller one.

I needed to make a way to reliably lay out the pieces, since there will be a lot of them. I started by trying to lay it out on tape stuck to a yardstick. That was an error-prone process, and sure enough, I made an error or two. It was also painfully obvious that my precision in marking this way was not good:

But then I had one of those wonderful moments of cross-pollination, where I started thinking like a machinist instead of a woodworker. After all, that was the reason I took up machine work in the first place! One of my recent purchases was a very cheap (yes, good old Harbor Freight) set of calipers. Calipers are used to measure, but also to make markings by scribing scratches into the material.

Since the bigger cut is 2.75" long, and I wanted an inch between each bottle, I set the calipers to 3.75". Then, I marked the starting location for the center of the first bottle, and could just walk along, putting one side of the caliper in the mark I just made (easy to get right, since the point settles into the scratch), and then mark the other one. When done, the spacing was guaranteed to be right. It's also easy to use a fine Sharpie to darken the scratch so they stand out.

Once that was done, I needed to decide how to cut all those bottle locations. It's difficult to make a partial cut on the edge of something, because the tool wants to wander and mess up the cut. I could use a 1.25" Forstner bit that I already owned for the smaller cut, but I needed a big hole (4" diameter) for the bigger cut, even though I was just using 1/2" of the circle's arc. I bought a hole saw at Lowes, and went to work.

This is sort of the standard setup for cutting an arc from an edge. You create a fence that "buries" most of the bit, and gives you a place to align and clamp the workpiece. You can see that I have 4 big clamps securely clamping the fence fixture to the drill press table, and I also used a couple more clamps to hold the workpiece. Stuff really wants to move around when you're doing this operation!

You can see in the test piece below how the cut works. It was very gratifying to hold this up to the original sketch made at Sydne's - it matched perfectly.

Once I had that all figured out, I made a rough prototype to see how it felt. I brought it home and put it next to the fridge, since that's where the eventual wine rack will live. I set it on a bookshelf to test. I like it!

Lots more to do on this project, but I feel like I'm off to a good start. 

Continue on to Wine Rack, Part 2