Easy Tool Rack - Part II

In the last post I wrote about the joinery I used for this tool rack. Now that all the parts are ready, I choose to finish it before nailing it together.

I found a new kind of milk paint from the Czech Republic.

I want to finish it before knocking it together. I think it will be easier to paint some parts while leaving the parts that see sharp tools natural with a coat of wax.

This will leave future repairs to (hopefully) the bits that just will need some wax.

The first coat of milk paint is always scary.

The reason I chose milk paint is mostly due to the fact that I would like to try this black over red finish that Curtis Buchanan uses on his Windsor chairs on my rocking chair. I find it always beneficial to practice on a piece of shop furniture before committing to a new finish.

I watched all of Curtis' YouTube videos on the subject a couple times. The idea is to put a really nice undercoat of a color on, with two or three coats. Then, a couple coats of a thinned out black wash, followed by a thorough rubbing down with steel wool to bring up a nice sheen.

The undercoats went on beautifully in the end. The black wash is started in this pic.

I'm not sure if my technique was bad, or if it is the different brand of milk paint, but my results were remarkably different than what I was going for.  I was hoping the piece would be black with a hint of green underneath, and maybe some stronger green on the edges and places where the black wore down a bit more.

Instead, as soon as I started with the steel wool, the black started to completely disintegrate. In fact, the green would have, too, if I hadn't had stopped.

I wound up just lightly going over the black with the steel wool, trying my best not to obliterate all of the paint that I had spent so much time putting on.

Once that was done, I added some of my special linseed oil followed by my home-made soft wax. Even though the finish isn't what I expected, I think it is kind of cool. Especially for a piece like this.

The top shelf after rubbing down, oil and wax.

Curtis explains in his video with the black that you really need to rub hard with 000 steel wool. The effect the video shows is a real burnishing of the paint, with just a tinge of his red undercoat showing through. When his chair is finished, you would definitely say it is black with a little red.

I think mine came out more like a green with a bit of antiquing to it. I'll definitely have to experiment with this finish some more. I really liked this brand of milk paint, but perhaps using the same brand that Curtis uses will be a big help.

Moving on...

I used some long 60mm Roman nails to attach everything. Before I started, I made a test joint to see how big of a pilot hole I would need in order to avoid splitting the wood, being that it is now only 1/2" thick in those places and very close to the edges. I found out that the top board gets a 4mm pilot hole followed by a tapered pilot hole in the endgrain to be joined.

4mm pilot holes.

I drilled the holes so the nails are at different angles in one direction. This will hopefully add a bit of strength. Not that I'll need it, the Roman nails hold like no other fastener I've ever used, being square and tapered in both directions.

Roman toe nails.

I thought that workholding for this assembly would be difficult with my limited clamping ability, but my joints were tight and held themselves which allowed me to get the nails in and driven home with no problems.

Funky workholding, but there were no problems.

The pilot holes even prevented splitting this close to the edges!

All in all, I'm really pleased with my Easy Tool Rack. It was easy, even though I made it a bit more complicated. Thanks to Christopher Schwarz and Popular Woodworking for the idea.

Tool rack on the wall.

Another artistic photo of my completed project.

A view of what looks like a shrine to Christopher Schwarz. You can see at least four (maybe five) of his projects in this shot.

Easy Tool Rack - Part I

Yesterday was a banner day for me. I finished two projects on the same day! To celebrate, I am sharing this project only on this blog. I've hinted at it on Instagram recently, but if you follow me on Instagram, you really haven't seen this project yet.

The Easy Tool Rack.

This is a fantastic project that Christopher Schwarz came up with a while back for Popular Woodworking's I Can Do That series. It looks good, is a useful piece of shop furniture, and is dead-simple to make if you follow Chris' instructions.

Of course I need to do this, and of course I need to make it unnecessarily complicated.

First, let's go get some wood. On the bus.

This is a good-sized project that will test the work holding I have available to me. Plus, I don't have a pocket-hole jig, and I am using only my set of hand tools.

I think I want to cut a notch in the back of the side pieces and nail the back board directly onto the sides from the back, and I want a through, wedged mortise and tenon for the front rail. I'll think about how to attach the top later.

My bowsaw does a good enough job roughing out the shape of the sides.

The string on my bowsaw broke as I was getting ready to make this cut, so I had to run to the 2 Euro store to get some more string. I came home with some nylon cord that seems to work just fine. It's yellow with red in it. You know, because Spain.

In the hope of keeping these posts from getting too annoyingly long, I have figured out how to make GIF images, so hopefully you can see a little mini-slideshow of what I'm doing.

Once the shape was roughed out for the side pieces, I wanted to make them as close to perfectly the same as possible. I figured the easiest way to do that was to clamp them together and use spokeshaves to bring them down. My flat spokeshaves did a great job on the flat and convex parts, and I had to bring out a front-to-back curved spokeshave for the concave part.

I finished off the very bottom of the supports by marking the roundover with a coin, cutting a 45 degree piece off with my saw, and rasping it to final shape.

Once they were the same, I used a side-to-side curved spokeshave to put a gentle profile on it. Unfortunately this spokshave wouldn't touch the concave parts, but I do have a scraper I made a while back that happens to have the same profile.

A mini-slideshow showing the shaping of the side supports.

I really liked the feel of this slight roundover. It is gently enough of a curve that you really don't notice it from a distance, but it really feels nice to the touch. I liked it so much, I decided to do this treatment to all of the exposed edges on this piece, except the flat parts of the tool holders.

After adding a chamfer to the top shelf, I added the roundover to the edge.

Next it's time to work on the front tool support.

I ripped the tool support to width.

There was a problem when I crosscut to length. A cavity, similar to something you might run into with plywood!

There's really no way to prevent this.

This edge was going to be exposed, as it was intended to be the end of a through tenon. I decided that since I didn't know how much I would lose when I cut it shorter, that I would change the design instead. Rather than doing a through mortise and tenon, I would do a 1/4" stopped mortise and tenon, and use Roman nails to secure them.

I had a bit of a difficult time planing the faces of these boards, but it was easy to get them smooth with a card scraper.

This pine scraped smooth just fine.

Christopher Schwarz used store-bought Shaker pegs for his rack, so I figured I would do the same. I couldn't really find anything I liked, but I did find some super cheap coat racks that had nice-enough looking pegs on them. I bought two and hoped I would get something I could use.

Luckily, they were just sloppily glued in place. All eight pegs came out with just a little bit of twisting with my hands. I feel sorry for whoever buys these things expecting to use them to actually hold something. I'm sure the pegs would pop out after a short time of light use.

It was a quick matter to clean them up by scraping the PVA glue off of them. They were unfinished, so they only needed some sanding.

To mount them to my rack I drilled a stopped 10mm hole in the parts I had marked with a pair of dividers. After that, I used a smaller bit to go all the way through. A little hide glue and a screw from the back hold these pegs securely. And I mean, securely. These pegs aren't coming off without destroying something on this piece.

Here's another mini-slideshow documenting the mounting of the pegs.

After that it was time to move my attention to the stopped mortises. It's not so much a mortise and tenon as I housed the ends of the boards. I did try something new on this one: Charles Hayward said a good way to rough out stopped rabbets is with a gouge. I figured I'd try it, and it worked great. There was only a little to remove with the routing plane using this technique.

Yet another GIF showing the routing of the mortises.

That's about it. It's really starting to look like a shelf now.

Mocked up, it is looking good.

Overall, I would have to say the lesson here is that it's OK to change the plan for your joinery to suit your tool set, as well as the materials you have to work with.

Next up, milk paint.