Making A Wooden Coat Stand

My friend asked me to make a coat stand for them and gave me basically free reign on the design, other than it needed to hold 8 coats.



I Based my design around a long 32mm dowel... however large hardwood dowels aren't easy to come by in New Zealand and one of the only companies that make and sell them couldn't do it in Ash and couldn't guarantee that it'd be straight. So I set about making my own, I initially thought I'd try one of the many dowel making jigs out there but wasn't having much success in getting a consistent diameter or avoiding large chip outs.



So I decided to approach it like I would a canoe paddle shaft, cutting 45° bevels to make it an octagon and then using a block plane to shave down the corners until I had something round enough to sand into a dowel. It's not 100% perfect (so I needed to sand it to fit into the hole in the base) but you'd be hard pressed to tell even feeling it that it isn't 100% perfectly round.


I turned the base on my lathe and used a 34mm forstner bit to drill the centre hole for the upright dowel.


I was also having issues with the small dowels chipping out with the various dowel making jigs so I decided to not waste any more wood and instead turned the small dowels on the lathe, this was good lathe practice as I don't usually turn anything that needs to be an exact diameter. I I roughed each black to round, then made small cuts to the correct diameter and then joined those cuts together before finish sanding.



You can probably see my drill press wobble a bit, I forgot to capture it on camera but in order to get the holes drilled in the end of the 1.8m dowel I had to raise the drill press up off the floor and strapped it on to an old tool chest.


I placed the coat hangers at random to keep it looking organic and modern, after each hole I would fill all the drilled holes with dowels, work out where I wanted the next dowel to sit and mark it before taking it back to the drill press to drill it.



I finished the stand with 2 coats of Osmo oil. It was my first time using Osmo oil and I was very impressed with how easy it was to apply and the finish I got. Supposedly its tough enough for wooden floors so I'm sure it'll protect the coat stand very well.


If you're interested in what I'm up to in my workshop at the moment I post more regularly on my instagram account   / davidbrynparker   you should follow me there!

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