Wine Rack
One of the most unique projects we have had the pleasure of taking on is a wine rack that is to be built into an old English phone booth. We have no idea where the client picked it up, but it is a pretty cool find!
I don’t know much about the phone booth, but it doesn’t seem like an exterior phone booth. It had a small seat and a small writing surface inside, along with a light bulb on the ceiling. The inside walls are lined with embossed metal sheets, maybe tin.
The wine rack is pretty simple – two sides pieces with twenty-two horizontal pieces creating eleven racks that will hold five bottles each.
We are using 4/4 red oak for all the pieces, in order to match the booth as closely as possible.
We milled all the rack pieces using an MDF template and a flush-trim router bit installed in the router table to ensure every single piece was exactly the same. We also cut a 1/4″ tenon on each end that will be glued into the corresponding mortise that we cut into the side piece.
After mixing up a custom matched formula, we stained all the pieces prior to assembly. This method was easier than struggling to reach in between the pieces and trying to get stain into every nook and cranny. After letting the stain dry for a couple of hours, we added glue to the mortises on the sides, inserted the horizontal racks, clamped securely, and left overnight to dry.
A view of the finished wine rack after the stain and a couple of coats of pre-catalyzed lacquer.
We decided that the easiest way to mount the rack in the booth would be to remove the entire side, which was attached with 12 screws. So, after backing them out, we lifted off the side and had easy access to the inside.
The final view of the phone booth. The wine rack fit inside the booth absolutely perfectly. The right hand side is screwed on and the left side sits snugly up against the left side window trim. This picture really doesn’t do it justice. It is a really cool looking unit, and it will look even more amazing after it has been filled up with 55 wine bottles!
March 24th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
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