Spice Rack, Part 2

well, my pallet wood spice rack didn't come together as i had hoped. there was just too much 'correcting' to be done to make the wood square and the rack was twisted so i am going to relegate it to displaying Gabe's rock collection or something.

starting over, this time i picked out some straighter salvaged wood from the slats of an old bed frame. these started out in much better shape so that was a big plus.

i started by trying to joint one edge to get that reference edge to make all my other edges straight. i used my router mounted to the router accessory table of my table saw and offset the router's fences with a flush trim bit in the middle. the first pass on the first piece came out OK, but there was a crook that the router had cut into the wood. i adjusted the fences and tried again but still not straight. well, after several tweaks and several attempts, the wood was getting worse. on top of that, the router fence was getting mangled. so much for that!

plan B was to use a straight guide and the router in hand to cut the edge i wanted into the working material. i knew i couldn't cut all the way across the piece of wood as the clamps would get in the way. i did as much as i could do in each pass and ended up with several very usable pieces. success! this was a much better start than the pallet wood so i was optimistic.

now that i had my true edge, i cut the ends off the material so i'd have a full straight edge on all the pieces. i did this using my table saw. pieces that were too long to move along the saw (fence and makeshift work table in the way) i cut with a circular saw before running through the table saw. this left me with several boards of various length that all had one true edge.

next i cut all the boards to length again using the straight edge as my reference edge and getting my sliding miter sled as square as possible to the saw blade. i cut two at a time so i didn't end up with several close, but not same, lengths of wood. i still ended up trimming a hair off two of the pieces. now i had my three (theoretically) straight edges so it was time to rip to width.

i had already waxed all the contact surfaces of my table saw as i had serious binding issues with the last spice rack when ripping. that led to a bunch of stuck wood with burned edges. this time, with straight edges running along the fence and a slick work surface, the wood flew through the saw beautifully. i now finally had my final pieces and they were a ton straighter along all the edges than the pallet wood.

it was time to sand so i took my random orbital sander with 80 grit to both surfaces of each piece until i was satisfied with the look. i guess i need some practice as all the pieces came out with slightly ground down edges. oops. i stopped sanding here as i didn't know what i wanted to do as a finish. i decided to assemble for now.

using clamps, spacers, and the work table, i predrilled countersunk holes for some coarse screws and glued and screwed everything together. i used pre-cut identical 6-inch pieces of wood as spacers between the shelves and everything came out looking good. the rack is slightly out of square so a 1/4-inch piece of plywood may be in order for the backing.

so that's where it is for now. Kristen wants front pieces to prevent jars from falling out. i kind of like the way it looks, though. next chance i get, i'll cut some strips of wood to use as guard rails and think about the finish so it doesn't get hammered too badly. until then...