I live in the northeastern United States and we have all the seasons with all the temperature variations and weather that come with that. I wouldn’t have it any other way. We tend to keep the house cool in the evenings all year round and if we’re watching TV or reading we have blankets to adjust our personal temperature. In the last few years my beautiful and talented wife has taken up weaving as well as spinning and dying wool and other fibers. She wove both of the blankets in the picture above and she spun and dyed all the wool for the one in the foreground.
One small problem with blankets is that they tend to slither onto the floor if you’re not using them. So, I decided to build a blanket rack to hold them and to display them in the off season. I did some research on various styles of blanket rack and decided on this design which is a hybrid of things I liked about several that I saw. I made a scale drawing before I got started…
As usual the drawing is more of a guide than a blueprint… The material is two layers of 1/2” sanded pine plywood that I had left over from another project. I glued up the blanks rough side to rough side to make 1” pine plywood that had two sanded knot free sides. The glue-up came out great and I have become smart enough to make the blanks larger in all dimensions so I could true the edges up on the table or miter saw.
A hero tool on this build was the sanding station with a 50 grit belt on it, I was able to tape the two ends together and rough cut the curve at the top on the band saw and then just sand curve to the final shape with the sanding station.
The second hero was my new Bosch Colt 1 HP Variable-Speed Palm Router which saved the cutting of the openings in the ends. I had originally tried to use a jigsaw, but the blade immediately wandered, bent and mangled the cut… I ended up cutting them out with the Palm Router and multiple passes with a 1/4” straight cutting bit. I had to cut out the mangled section, glue in a replacement piece from an offcut of the material and then fill and sand it… I also rounded over all of the edges with the Palm Router and that did a fantastic job as well. I really like this router, it is much easier to control than the big beast that I got for the router table.
I got some practice fixing/hiding my fuck-ups and I’m happy with where it came out, I was able to patch fill and sand the mistake so that unless you know where to look you can’t really detect it. I painted the stand with a latex super primer and a semi-gloss white latex finish coat. All in all the rack works well and I’m happy with how it looks.
