feed back on wine rack design.

[Adam Herd]

My next project, assuming spring does come, will be a wine rack for a friend. I can't draw so I have used google sketchup. Dimensions, the legs are 1 1/2" square and 48" tall. from the out side edges the legs are 29" inches long ways and 8" deep. the rails that will hold the wine bottles are 3/4" by 3" and will be held with mortise and tenons. The cross members and including the apron at the top are 3/4" by 2". I did not like the look of 3" I felt they looked to wide for how long they are. at the same time I don't know if I like them not being as wide as the wine bottle rails. I hope this all makes sense and every one can follow it. If any one has any other questions or wants a different angle just ask. Thanks on the help.

[Yonak Hawkins]

Adam, I think it looks good. The only thing that concerns me is it looks top-heavy with a fairly small footprint. An accidental shove may tip it.

[Adam Herd]

I hadn't thought of that but I did feel that it was very narrow. But it needs to be narrow because wine bottles are not that long. I was thinking about attaching a piece like this at the bottom of the legs for more support but again I don't know if I like the look. The white is supposed to be negative space for some reason I can't get rid of the wall.

[Adam Herd]

this is a better visual.

[Wayne Lomman]

Does it have to be free standing? That bottom foot spoils the look of the piece. It would be better to find a way to invisibly bracket it to a wall for stability. Cheers

[Robert Cherry]

Here’s a Photo of the one my wife had before we got married. It’s sturdy and the sides are open like your original design.
CF1F9678-C324-4179-A2F9-11FFEE6FA76A.jpg

[David Utterback]

The wine cabinets that I have built have bottle rails that are only 1/2" thick by 2" wide. They do not need to be beefy at all since the load is limited. As others noted, you might want to add rows nearer the bottom to increase stability. Good luck with the project.

[Adam Herd]

how tall is yours? I almost feel that mine is to tall. I just picked 48" for easy I haven't actually measured that out or anything yet.

[Adam Herd]

Also does any one know if you can buy an arc template or something? Or is there a better way to draw an arc. On sketchup I can only draw degrees of circles full circle half cirlce quater circle etc. But on a lot of the wine racks i see on google the shape that cradles the bottle and the neck looks more elliptical. An elliptical shape would allow me to go out wider with out going as deep. When I was in elementary school (about 10 years ago) we used to have I believe we just called them templates not sure and not important. Any way what they were was a rectangular piece of thin plastic and they had a ruler on the side, a protractor on the bottom as well as a bunch of cut outs for tracing different shapes, hexagons, trapezoids, different sized circles etc. I bring it up because I am imaging something like that but with a bunch of different arcs that I could use to trace for the cradles. I am absolutely horrible at drawing so just figuring out how wide and deep the cradles are and connect the dots won't work for me. A compass only gives you degrees of a circle. So what would be the best way for me to make the arcs for the cradles? The way I have the cradles currently in sketchup is half circles but they are much deeper then I need them to be. For Instance I need an arc that is about 3 1/2" wide but only 1" deep. I hope that all makes sense. I know I kinda rambled to describe what I meant.

Ps. You may remember the templates from putting your pencil through the smallest hole possible and spinning the template around and getting in trouble with your 5th grade teacher.

[Lee Schierer]

Most CAD programs will let you draw arcs of any size. Once you have an acceptable arc. Print the arc on white paper and glue the paper to a piece of wood to make a template. You can hog out the waste with a saw, chisel, file etc. and sand it smooth. Once you have the template you can make as many cut outs as you want. You could even use teh template with a router to quickly cut all your arcs for your wine rack.

[Steve Jenkins]

One advantage to using semicircles is you can start with a board twice as wide as you need.Then using a hole saw drill a row of holes then rip the board in half

[Dave Richards]

how tall is yours? I almost feel that mine is to tall. I just picked 48" for easy I haven't actually measured that out or anything yet.

My gut feeling is that you should make it shorter both for aesthetic reasons as well as for stability. Since you're modeling your rack in SketchUp, you could determine the center of gravity and capsize point easily enough.

[David Utterback]

My cabinet is 35" tall with 5 rows for bottles. It has a multi-pane glass door.
wine cabinet.jpg

Like Steve said, cut larger diameter holes in the middle of a board with a circle cutting jig and rip it in 2. I used a Forstner bit for the small radius holes and then cut the sides at right angle to the edges. The result is a U-shaped slot to hold the bottle necks.

[Adam Herd]

I have changed the overall height to 38 3/4" and I feel that it look much more proportionate. How ever I am not sure about the depth. I am not sure if it is deep enough to be stable.

[Brett Luna]

I have changed the overall height to 38 3/4" and I feel that it look much more proportionate. How ever I am not sure about the depth. I am not sure if it is deep enough to be stable.

Your drawing shows the front racking as being attached flush to the front of the legs while the rear racking offset to the inside. You could offset the front racking to the inside as well and increase the depth by the amount of that offset.

Me, I prefer to have the bottle tops more or less even with the front of an open rack so I would definitely increase the depth to more or less match the length of the longest bottle to be stored. To keep the rack spacing right, you could attach the racking to the stretchers.