Winerack

Project: modular wine rack - based on an earlier experiment.

Material:  mispressed 10mm MDF veneer - maple on one side and what looks like walnut on the other

Constraints: make two sets to fit onto the available redundant material

Finishing: cleaning, oiling

Pretty early on into the Xmas gift list planning I considered making wine racks for anyone who’d be in need of one.  I’d just designed one as a material demo, and there was a pile of unusable veneer MDF that was taking up valuable storage space and needed using up.  This was not the time to resist killing two birds with one stone. 

The initial design was for a 6mm material, so I had to rescale the joints for a 10mm thickness.  That should be easy.  And it is.  But only if you’ve done it numerous time before. Unless, of course, you’ve modelled your design in a parametric CAD program, such as Solidworks.   Then it’s super-easy. I miss Solidworks.  Alas, I drew the whole thing with vectors, where scaling  for 3D has to be done manually.  I prototyped all the joints first to ensure the fit because there was only enough material for two sets of wine racks, so there was no room for error.  The design intended for each rack to fit onto two 800mm x 400mm sheets of material – double the original whiteboard design.

The bottom feet were extended in both direction for extra stability, which wasn’t required for the single module.  The cut pieces got a wipe with some meths to get rid of the charcoal residue, and were then rubbed with some linseed oil to bring out the grain.  Once that time consuming process was over, the racks were assembled.  And what a horribly awkward shape to wrap that was…