hat rack

 I have lots of hats, although most should be called or are considered a cap. Some say "trucker hat", some say baseball cap", I say it's my hat. 

Do I collect them? Sort of? Not really? Maybe. I'll get a hat before a tshirt or sweatshirt or other clothing as a souvenir, because of cost and also because I am not fancy. 

I built a hat rack YEARS ago from some pine boards. I had gotten plans from somewhere.....trace it on, drill some holes, cut it out, screw it on. And I never much liked it. It's vertical, which makes it a chore or pain to access the hats. 

So I set out to make a new one. I've got a space on my wall above a hook and peg board for some clothing, so that's what set the size parameters. It's 3.5" by 30". 

I traced the old hooks, and modified them. The wood I used is pine; I had made a mistake when cutting pieces to make a medium large Jenga, so that was dumb and good, I guess. Pine 2x4 boards creates challenges and have faults. 

Modifications: the old one was one piece with all the hooks cut into one board. The new one has 5 individual double hooks, with larger holes and better slots. 

Some hooks survived the drilling, but some didn't. I drilled with a spade bit, (the flat bit with the really long pointy end), so I drilled half way, turned it over and drilled the other way, so it wouldn't chip out or break out. This bit has some spurs on it, so drilling created convex wooden washers. Some of the hooks didn't survive the cutting of the slots, and some didn't survive the sanding. I used a spindle sander to sand the hole and random orbital sander to sand the faces, ends, sides of the hooks. I knew better than to use a router with a round over bit.....holding them would be dangerous and the pine would break.

Oh, sure.  I could have used poplar, walnut, maple, locust, oak, beech, mahogany, cedar, ash, osage orange, or some other wood from pallets that has remained unidentified. Some of it is beautiful and some of it is not. But I had wasted the pine, so I had to use that. 

The backer board, which is screwed to the wall eventually, is oak. It's bowed, twisted, warped, knotty, and the perfect choice for this project. It's not really usable for a bigger project, i.e. when it'd need to be glued into a panel. It has the character it needs to stand alone and do it's job. 

Traced, cut, drilled, sanded, stained and pilot hole drilled. That pilot hole....if you look at the hook, you can see there's not a huge area for the screw to go. So I measured and marked the backer board, drilled that, put a screw in to mark where to drill the hook. I stained the hooks, sanded the backer mounter board and installed the hooks onto the board with one screw and a little glue. Since the screw clamped it, I didn't use any clamps. I realized at that point that I should have stained the main board too, which is smart. But not a big deal, really. One coat of gloss varnish, which took several days to dry. Despite that long drying time, it looks pretty good, with very little dust trapped in the finish. (I got lucky)(because I kept doing dusty work in the shop)

Installation was pretty straight forward: decide where to put the mounting holes, drill them, find screws and "finish washers", and then mount it. If you recall, I have plaster over sheetrock walls, so I just screwed the screw into the wall. No anchors.