Some time ago, I was browsing the web in search of nice ways to store some wine/booze bottles. I stumbled upon a nice modern wine rack design from some guy/company that seems to have gone off the radar since 2011. As there was no way to contact them, I decided to mimic the design on the Shapeoko.
While the original is definitely beautiful, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make it even more to my liking. First of all I wanted it to be able to hold more bottles. Later I also added some space for oddly shaped bottles. I have limited rack space in my storage room, so the final dimensions were based off of that.
Here’s the design I came up with:
Unlike the original, the front and back grids are not identical. Instead I opted to create an offset between them so that the bottle sits level when stored. The offset is an average between a slim wine bottle, and a larger champagne bottle, covering a wide range of diameters. The grids will be cut out of 8 mm MDF stock, and spraypainted metallic black, mimicing the original’s metal grids. I didn’t put corner radiuses into the design, as the endmill will automatically do that for me. And for some obscure reason Illustrator CS6 still has no usable corner radius/fillet tool. Although I read somewhere that CC finally tackled this issue.
Milling the grid:
The result was already looking very promising.
Now off to the spray booth.
… Aaaand done! The metallic paint really came out better than expected.
For the frame, I bought a long thick board of pine. I really wanted to do miter joints, which was probably a mistake. The board was slightly warped (it was preprocessed, so I assumed it would be dead flat) which was a bummer, considering what I paid for it. I did a few passes through my compact planer which helped, but at that point it was impossible to get it absolutely straight. So obviously the miter joints were a bitch and I had to try different configurations in order to find the one that looked the best over all 4 joints. It turned out okay-ish I guess but next time I’ll just do finger joints with the CNC, which would also fit the overall design.
Routing the slits:
Final assembly was easy with pre-drilled holes.
Installed in the rack I designed it for. It took some muscle to make it fit, but it just looks so damn good now that it is in! Although I think I am going to take it out again tomorrow to fill the small gaps in the joints and do some other cosmetical touch-ups.
