The plate rack

I woke up one morning really wanting to make a plate rack. I had no idea why, we had no need for one at home and nobody had asked me to make one, but I thought it would be a fun build.

I had recently come across some lengths of pine board that had been used as a display stand in a shop, and after they had been stripped of all nails and loads of horribly gummy sticky tape I sanded them smooth. They came up really well, to the point that they could have been mistaken for new boards.

With the rough design cues scribbled on a sheet of paper I was ready to start on the sides. I pencilled in the first line and cut the board to get two side “blanks” from a single board:

Next I secured them together so I could get two identical pieces. I deliberately left the pieces long so I could screw them together at the ends without damaging the main pieces.

Next I used chisels, files and a coping saw to add detail to the pieces:

After sanding everything smooth I ended up with two identical pieces:

I had decided on three shelves for the plate rack, the bottom two were simple straight shelves, but the top one would be wavy to accept the cup hooks. This took forever to lay out, but after that it was just a case of carefully following the line to cut it out and then sand it smooth.

Like most of my furniture, the plate rack was designed to not have any mechanical fixings, such as screws or nails. I used mortise and tenon joinery to secure the shelves to the sides. I cut the tenons on the ends of the shelves, then cut the mortises in the sides to match:

After that it was time to dry fit everything together:

The dry fit went well, but before I glued everything together, I realised I needed some way to stop the plates from sliding off the shelves. I used one of my favourite tools, a Rapier #3 grooving plane, to cut the grooves along the front edge of the bottom two shelves:

I’m very glad I remembered to do that before I glued the rack together, because it would have been a hundred times harder to put those grooves in with the ends of the shelves closed in! With that job done, the glue up went together without any issues. Remember, you can never have too many clamps:

After checking the rack was perfectly square I left everything to set overnight, then finished it with several thin coats of wax, which really let the grain of the wood show through. Wax isn’t the toughest wood finish around, but this isn’t a piece of furniture that will be used heavily or even touched, other than the occasional dusting. I then predrilled four holes to accept small brass hooks for the cups to hang from, and the plate rack was complete:

Remember that I said we had no use for a plate rack? Well I was planning on selling it or offer it to friends and family, but it was about this time that fate stepped in with other ideas.

The first thing to know is that my wife has a mild obsession with tea sets. If she bought every one we found that she liked then we would need a warehouse to store them all. Which is precisely why she had none.

The second thing to know was that my grandad has passed away a little while ago and we were involved in the horrible process of clearing his house.

So can you guess what happened? That’s right, we found a tea set that my wife fell in love with. So back it came with us to Leeds. We hung the plate rack in the kitchen, and despite me never having seen it before (the tea set had been stored in a tea chest in the back of the store room wrapped in newspaper and plastic bags and buried under winter clothes and suitcases) it fit like I had custom built the plate rack for it:

So there it is. I started building something that we had no use for but ended up being the perfect thing to make. My wife got her tea set and a fancy unit to display it, and I got something I can look at every day to remind me of a great man. Sometimes the universe just steps in and gives you a little hand.

This one’s for you grandad. Thanks for the inspiration, even if I didn’t realise it at the time.