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Getting free lumber isn't always as free as we might think, especially pallet wood. Wood from pallets is often pretty nasty stuff. It's often been kicked, dragged, smashed and driven over before we get it. It's almost always embedded with tiny rocks and gravel, hardened nails or screws and who knows what else. All of these unwanted elements go a long way to dulling, damaging or even ruining jointer and planer knives and even saw blades. Still, it's fun to get, but even more rewarding is getting lumber that already has some character to it. All this means is that you need to treat pallet wood differently than you do virgin wood from the lumber store. The fact that it does have all these embedded nasty elements is the reason we use it.
I have found the best tool to use for pallet wood is either a circular saw, or a table saw with a circular saw blade installed. Circular saw blades are much less expensive than 10” table saw blades. If you are going to use a jointer or planer, sanding the wood first, or brushing it off with a wire brush, then using one of the hand metal detectors to check for metal is a must. Of course the problem with doing this is that you are often destroying the patina of the wood, but ... we do what we need to.
The purpose of this project is to make a decorative wine carrier, that can also double as a wine rack. We decided to use some “character” pallet wood. There is no reason that wood from the lumber store or other sources cannot be used, the only real requirement for the sizes we made is that it be 3/4 inch stock material. Before we give out some dimensions, it's important to note that there is no standard in wine bottle sizes of shapes. The bottles we selected were of similar size and shape so that they would interchange with one another.
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This was supposed <supposed !> to be a quick, easy project. I had no idea going into this project it would take as long as it did, and be as complicated as it was. After all, it's only a simple wooden serving platter.
It started off easy, I had a piece of wood with natural edges that had been sitting around in my wood storage room for several years because I didn't know what to do with it. I started off by selecting a section of it that would be perfect for the platter ... even sawed it off with a hand saw to be safe.
Next I planed the thickness of the board to around 3/4 inch, just thin enough it was easy to handle but still showed off enough of the natural edge to make it look great.
Now, unbeknown to me, the hard part started. How to you prepare the edges of this board without destroying it's natural look. It was quite craggy and rough and needed to be smoothed down but still retain the natural edge look. I decided to start off with a tiny wire brush on my rotary tool. To my delight it worked great ...
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Wooden kitchen and cooking accessories continue to be highly popular, maybe even more in the past because people more and more are appreciating the values and beauty of natural woods. In this article and associated video we make a natural edge Lazy Susan from a slice from a Black Locust tree that was being taken down because the tree had died. This gave us a perfect opportunity to secure pieces of wood that were already fairly dry, certainly dry enough to use for out purposes here. We also like the fact that the bark was still very well secured. It appeared that the tree had possibly been winter killed which would account for the fact that the bark would not peel off readily.
Our first challenge was to find a short log among all the logs that had been cut that would be suitable. We chose one that looked to have little cracking but that still had a slight angle cut because we wanted the finished piece to be somewhat oval rather than a perfect circle, just to add a bit of character to our build.
On getting 16 inch log into out workshop, the next thing to do was to cut of a slice with our a chainsaw. Working with short pieces of wood is always dangerous, not matter what tool you are using so we needed to make sure the log was fully secured before we sliced off the piece we needed ...
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Not everyone has the room, or the budget for a lovely wine room and for those who still like to have a few nice bottles of wine on hand, or to maybe show off some vintage collection, this little wine rack is perfect. It only holds 6 bottles but it is small enough to display your wine collection on a dinning room hutch, a side table, perhaps on a kitchen or serving counter and still look great.
All in all the wine rack is easy to build but there are a few things you need to keep in mind. The first and most important thing is that sizes are critical. In our case we were using 3/8 notches and 3/8" width wood and in order for the wood to fit the notches in a nice snug fit, the wood needs to be milled and sanded to a very accurate width.
The second most important thing to consider is the wood. You need to make sure the wood is a good, quality hard wood and that the grain is tight and straight-grained because it will be holding 6 bottles of wine, so any cross-grain wood will not be good.