Our TV bench was overflowing with DVD's, so figured it was time to get a dedicated rack happening. Purchased stuff is generally pretty expensive, and I wanted "das uber rack", so whipped up something in SketchUp so I could flesh out some ideas a little. This was a rough draft to scale of something 6 ft tall, x1 DVD wide. Of course the bottom DVD's would probably suffer a fair bit of weight.
The deck out back was rebuilt last summer, and I ended up with a load of the unused timber from the original tear-down. So I went and had a look at my scrap timber to see what I could do.
A few shelves cut up, and some MONSTER slabs of timber for feet.
I shaved the feet down into gigantic "ducks feet". They should support 6 feet of DVD's no problemo.
Decided to be lazy and screw everything together instead of getting fancy with inset joints etc. At this point I decided I might have gone overboard with the size of the feet.
Original single-stack prototype finished. Seems ok.
I used this in the house for a week before deciding to rework it. 1) It only held half of our DVD's. 2) Wasn't quite happy with the over sized feet.
I switched out the huge duck feet for a lesser gauge timber. I shaved these down in a similar fashion to the originals.
Decided to go double-width, so created some wider shelves. I'm hogging out slots for the center spar here.
Double width shelf. Pre-drilling.
Routed edges vs. hand chiseled slots. Think I'll go with the routed edges. A router makes completely amateur work look pro.
Just getting a feel for what it'll look like with the new width and feet.
Center spar goes in.
I only had a few pieces of 6ft length which I used on the original single-width test rack. So I had to butt-joint a few pieces end to end for the two new uprights.
End-to-End joints are generally pretty weak. But I think after the glue dries this will be as good as it gets. These came out looking pretty good after a sanding. I kinda like big heavy dowel joints which are visible right through. edit: yeah I know their orientation is wrong. The other length I did was fine...not sure how I screwed this one up...oops.
Took a photo thinking I was done. Oops forgot the back rests.
As always I've over-engineered again. You could park a truck on this. There's 50 x 60mm screws in this thing. (There is actually fifty)
OK finished now. Eh it came out ok. I'll stain the pine with dark mahogany later, and probably give it a matt/satin varnish. Possibly even oil it. Maybe next week ;-)What's really cool in this pic is the red of the rack decking timber vs. the actual deck in the background. The deck re-used all the timber from the tear-down, and I kept the stuff that was too short for the new orientation. It is actually the same stuff, same age, and both weathered the same. Only difference is sanding.
