Why Wood Wine Racks? Why Knot?

Yeah, why would I hand make wood wine racks? It’s not an easy answer… I don’t know… I don’t have a better idea?

I like to work and do stuff with my hands. Woodworking is a cool way to spend time. There are endless opportunities to learn about all kinds of things. A wise man told me that the thing that made it all tick was mystery.

I try to gather up piles of what is other wise wasted scrap material to make something. In this case, I had enough alder to make a taller piece, so I included a drawer and extra cornice molding. I have a few little design motifs that I use somehow on every piece I make. The moulding only works for me on taller pieces and I haven’t included it for a while. The mystery is, what works… what doesn’t? What could I make from this junk?

I do shop drawings and attach cut sheets so I can keep track of parts as I machine material for multiple pieces. Because of the modular nature of my basic design, I can and do change things as pieces get built. It starts with a little voice that asks what would happen if I…??

Some explanation why I make these things could be a kind of fascination with “stuff” and storing your “valuable stuff”. I saw comedian George Carlin way back in the ’60s and he did his famous routine about Stuff. I have always liked jewel boxes, display cases, cabinets that housed collections of stuff.

The real reason is that I read in the paper this week that the Oregon Wine Industry has grown from $500 million five years ago and now contributing $2.6 billion to the economy. The Mystery is how can I get noticed and find a slice of that?

Touring Oregon Wine Country?

After visiting all the great wineries and fantastic locations… YOU NEED ONE OF THESE… to hold the liquid gold!!

KTW#0911 -- 4 x 5 with a drawer -- African Mahogany and Alder

The summer has finally hit and we are in the 80s. The last couple years we had winter from Thanksgiving until July. Oregonians have coined a term; Junuary, for how dismal the weather was in June. I bet the grapes are loving it now.

Our winters are not that bad really, they just seem to last forever. It gets old, but the summers and fall here are worth it. We get a little bit of snow in the Willamette Valley if we are lucky, but not like the East… that is just crazy. Hey, if we want to see snow, all we have to do look east and Mt. Hood is glistening in the sun. They had great snow pack and were skiing and snow boarding through June. Drive 45 minutes and your in it.

Oh yeah, check out the triple lamination in the top. It’s an idea I stole from my cyber-friend in Austraila, Lazy Larry. The top came out pretty nice. This Mahogany has such a rich color and grain that my poor photography is not doing it justice. The water proof Poly finish I use really make it pop.

To the west is the Oregon Caost. One could be surfing out at Pacific City in the morning and in a few hours be up at Timberline on Mt. Hood looking at the Glacier! If you work it right, you could grab a bottle of wine from a tasting room along the way and cap the day off with a good meal.

My signature drawer pull. I was given four big slabs of this curly Maple from the Seattle area. It is dry as a bone and incredibly beautiful. I’m going to make an electric guitar or bass out of one of the slabs.

 

A long time ago, Oregonians decided that they wanted to leave the coast free of development, so the beaches and land is mostly like it always was… stunning. As is the rest of Oregon… the Cascade Mountain range through the Central part of the state and the arid high Desert in the east. Big place with not many people.

Portland is a gem of a town. It has taken a ribbing from the Portlandia spoof  on YouTube… Portland, the place where twenty-somethings go to retire. A Bay Area musician friend told me… “Portland is like a minature San Francisco only artsier.” Great music and arts scene, and as a people we are into food, beer and wine in a big way.

If you are lucky enough to be touring our Oregon wine country, I think you will find that you have only scratched the surface. You could spend months here… not see it all… and then it starts all over next year and is different.

Check back, I have more to show you soon.

 

 

 

 

Wine Racks Hand Made In Portland Oregon, USA

KTW #0711, #0811

Are you serious about your stash of wine?  GOT RACKS??

KTW #0711, #0811

A pair of six bottle wide racks that I cut out at the same time. Don’t they look naked without any wine bottles? That is where you aficionados come in…

KTW#0711 six bottles wide, five racks tall

… fill these racks with wine! Wouldn’t they look better with an eclectic mix of glass colors and labels? Ha,ha, ha!

KTW#0711 (6 x 5)

It would be too easy for me to draw a bunch of different rack designs, then go to my lumber supplier, buy a bunch of material and make them up. The first problem with that is that the material would cost me money. This is not a tool that I have.

KTW#0811 (6 x 6)

If you have followed this blog at all you know that I’m a scrappy, dumpster diving, recycling, reclaiming, up-cycling, woodworking kind of guy. Most of this material was salvaged from my neighbors who build custom uhpolstered furniture. They can’t really use small rips and off cuts from their manufacturing process, so they had been burning them or just putting it into the dumpster.

They buy ASC certified cabinet grade Alder. I really like the different shades of golden brown and tan that the water proof polyurethane finish I use imparts. For the features strip laminations, I use scraps of Oregon Black Walnut from logs I have dried and used for bigger pieces. I can’t bare to toss anything out, and I spend way too much of my time looking through stacks of scraps, to try and visualize what I might be able to make out of them.

I would have made an identicle pair but there weren’t any pieces long enough, so they are as tall as the pieces I could glean for the legs. It is so much harder to design and build pieces from found material.

I try to use the contrasting Black Walnut laminations to be part of the graphic image and design. The real reason is that I don’t get any really thick pieces and the woodworker in me thinks it is better to draw attention to the joinery than try to hide it.

If I had lots of big boards, so that I could make parts with all the color and grain patterns being similar, I could successfully deguise the joints. Still, I sort through stacks of my scraps to find complimentary color and grain patterns. But it’s organic you know? The boards were cut from trees growing out in the mountains. If you want it perfect, make it out of steel or plastic.

KTW #0711 & #0811

The Ultimate Father’s Day Gift!

I have to post some more photographs of KTW#6011. Usually by the time I get a piece into the finishing process I’m already thinking about which one of the projects I have sketched and gathered material for to start next. For some reason this piece really makes me smile when I see it.  With the stripes in the grain through the drawer carcase, it looks somehow alive.

I’m not so in love with it that I want it. First of all, I can’t afford to own my stuff. Second of all, I have a cool wine rack that I made from White Oak and Black Walnut a few years ago. It is much like this one with the two drawers, but a little smaller, holding 25 bottles. We have only had it full once. Mostly we only have a few bottles on hand, using the shelves to sort the newspaper and magazines. Then they are available to read when we eat, but can have a place to get that stuff off the table. We are Knot very hardcore drinkers.

I spent so much energy, literally blood, sweat and tears building it, that I can’t see getting enough money to part with it.  This wine table on the other hand needs to go to a good home. Hopefully to live it’s life in a beautifully furnished kitchen, dining room or even a wine cellar.

My process is being refined with every piece I construct. I’m getting a lot faster and better all the time.

It still takes me an enormous amount of time to make these racks, and there is an element of risk in each step of the process. I just chopped up a table that has been sitting on a shelf for a few years gathering dust. I got 90% into it and made a mistake that I couldn’t recover from. Whoops.

The most difficult thing for me right now is finding nice material and enough material to make at least one individual piece. So far, so good. This Khaya wood looks so elegant. I have enough to make one more like this. I don’t know what I will do with it. I could save it and use it in contrast with other woods.

I think about design all the time. All kinds of design in all kinds of disciplines and media. Woodworking uses a similar kind vocabulary as playing improvised musics, say straight ahead Jazz or Be-Bop. There may be no lyrics, but  still there is a kind of universal transference of feeling and emotion through melody, harmony and rhythm.

Working with hardwoods gives that same kind of opportunity for use as a kind of visual vocabulary. There is a kind of visceral transference of energy that happens too, because at one time these objects were alive and growing.

My hands have touched every single surface of this piece many, many times. In the end, I love being able to touch it and have it feel soft and smooth. I want the drawers to have just the right amount of slide and feel to them. I want to look forward to putting my fingers on the drawer pulls, because they feel right.

I could see this in a beach house or ski cabin, with some nice bottles of red parked there for those weekends that make the years memorable.

Free and Knot Free Wine Racks…

KTW #0311

Lavrens, my neighbor at the shop, came through for me again. He has a buddy who works or worked for a Canadian lumber wholesaler. A few years ago when the economy was still functioning, they bought units of exotic lumber to sell to high-end users. As the economy was destroyed, they went back to selling construction grade lumber and plywood. That didn’t work either so they closed the warehouse.

When they cleaned out the building, this unit of lumber was not in the inventory, so Lavren’s friend gave it to him, and he gave some to me. It is an African Mahogany called Khaya Ivorensis or commonly Khaya.

I cut one of the pallet skids in quarters for some legs. I was impressed by beauty of the grain and the color. It is fairly hard and dense. I don’t like the way the sawdust smells. It is a little acrid, but not horrible like Ipe, and certainly not as nice as real Honduras Mahogany.

These must have been some big trees because it appears like all heart wood. It mills up straight and true with no warping or cupping. Nice to work with and easy to machine.

Since I had quite a lot of material to choose from, I decided to make a piece that is narrow and a little taller. It holds 24 bottles and has a drawer for cork screws, stoppers and wine glass charms. 23 1/2″ wide  x  16 3/4″ deep  X 40″ tall.

The top turned out great. I planed a piece, crosscut it, then joined it back on itself for the field. You can barely see the joint.

I used Oregon Black Walnut for the feature strip and drawer pull.

The edge band was from a different piece of lumber. It’s pretty amazing how different the colors turned out from piece to piece. After I  sanded everything off, the colors seem rather uniform. The urethane I use made the grain and true colors pop out.

While the grain and figure from piece to piece is very uniform, look how different the legs are compared to the carcase, and the edge band against the field on the top.

Like I said, free from any knots… and my favorite type of wood too… free. Thanks Lavrens!

Knot normally the way I do it…

A lady saw photos of a wine rack I posted for sale on craigslist and contacted me. I invited her to the shop to see what different pieces I have in my inventory. She had a corner in her dining room where she wanted to place it and we discussed dimensions.

She looked at completed racks and I explained how the modular nature effected the over all dimensions. She gravitated to a piece that was constructed from Black Walnut and Sapele, and said she really liked the redish color of the Sapele… also know as African Mahogany. She ask what color of stain I used.

I had to laugh and said that there was no stain, I use different hardwoods to show off their natural color. There is no reason to use a stain. I do however use stains on the pieces I make out of soft wood like Pine, Fir or Cedar. I showed her a couple of those different  pieces and some raw wood to illustrate how washed out the natural wood looks generally. She wanted, if not to match, at least compliment her dining room table.

She ask how much the Walnut/Sapele piece was and I said it was three times as expensive as the Fir/Pine ones. It was too small for her but she really liked it. I had to laugh again. I said, you have good taste, your like my wife. She sees a red car and says, wow that is a beautiful car, I want one of those. I say, baby you have good taste… that is a Ferarri. How about that red car over there? No, I don’t like that so much. Well Babe, that’s a Toyota.

I had three racks made from Alder that were recently glued up but I had not made tops for yet. They were the right dimension and bottle capacity for her. I showed her the two most common tops I make… Mitered edge band, with or without a contrasting feature strip, and the Breadboard style with through tenon joint.

She liked the Breadboard style, saying that the way I leave the tenon protruding matched her table’s styling. I told her that I never stain hardwoods, but that furniture manufacturers routinely apply stains to Alder. I pulled out my drawer full of sample stain cans and proceeded to wipe stain on some Alder scraps. The first one or two colors were spot on for her. So I made a Breadboard top, stained the piece and applied three coats of polyurethane.

She picked it up yesterday and said it looked great. As much as I would love to be purist, use highly figured exotic woods and tradition oil and wax finishes… I’m not a snob. In the real world, it’s only other woodworkers that really know the difference between a Ferrari and a Toyota… or care. While it’s Knot normally how I do things, it pays the bills. I did like the way it turned out and more importantly so did she. Thanks for the support… another one goes to a good home.