Qx on a Joint - Wood Joint That Is

[Tom Banes]

Building a wine rack for the daughter. She wants it to fit into a shelf over their refrigerator. I "designed" the rack to be assembled inside the shelf facings - put the pieces in and put it together in place.

Front and rear panels are held together with blind (sliding?) dovetail joints and horizontal braces. Pics are posted at

question: is are the joints' tails strong enough? The wood is QS Sycamore. The tails measure about 5/16 square at their bases (smallest dimension) and are about 3/8 in length. The joints are "tap in" tight, not "press" fit but not a "drive it home" fit either. The pics show the braces without being tapped in tight for clarity, they are flush when tapped all the way in. I expect expansion/contraction of the joints in a controlled environment to be pretty low.

I tend to over engineer things from a strength perspective, but looking at the tails, I'm not comfortable. My intent is not to glue these joints (for when she moves one day and wants to take the rack out), just tap them into place and leave it as it is. Trial fits of the joints have shown the structure to be very stable under moderate hand pressure fore and aft. Almost all the stress should be vertical and minimal racking forces seem likely, unless someone gets wild pulling (or placing) a bottle. But I'm still not comfortable.

Should I recut the tails and/or pins and tails both to get more wood in the joints? It'll be a PITA, but I have extra stock for the braces, so it can be done.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Regards.

[Leuf]

If it would make you feel better you could add in diagonal pieces in between making an X

And you should really downsize your pictures before posting to the web

-Leuf

[Scott Lurndal]

Not a particularly good place to store wine. The waste heat from the refrigerator won't do the wine any good.

scott

[Edwin Pawlowski]

Considering the weight of 24 bottles of wine, I'd have something beefier and more of them. You have about 39 pounds of liquid, plus another 25 or so of glass.

I'd also encourge putting the wine in a cooler place. Top of the fridge is about the worst possible ploace aside from next to the oven. Aside from damaging good wine, how practical is it to place or remove bottles at that height? What are the chances of dropping one?

Nah, use the ones you have, just add a bunch more.

[dadiOH]

1. The entire image can be viewed without scrolling
2. They aren't 1.6 MB

IrfanView

[BobS]

Tom,

Putting aside the comments about where this rack is going to be located (she could always just fill some empties with colored water and use it as a decoration), I think I would do the following modification. Make the cross-piece about 4 times as wide. The single dovetail is plenty strong and when it has a wide shoulder on each side of it - that will help prevent any front-to-back racking.

All the weight of the bottles is straight down - unless mother nature has changed it lately, so there is little pressure on the front and backs. Bottles will slope towards front so the front will have some pressure but not enough to do any harm and it will help insure the dovetails are under constant tension.

Where the extra wide shoulders on the cross-pieces mate with the front and back, if there is no material there (such as the gaps I see between the rows, simply glue in a spacer). I think the only racking this will receive is when the bottles are put in or taken out. But if it's used only for decorative purposes, then that's not a problem.

Bob S.

[Tom Banes]

OOPS - forgot to resize. Sorry Leuf et al, now done!

[Tom Banes]

Apologize to all for not resizing the images - I simply forgot to do so.

They are now cropped and resampled at 72 DPI.

As for placing the wine over the refrigerator. I agree that's a lousy place to store wine and have said so. But, given that the wines she and her husband like are raely aged 2 weeks before being consumed and usually have screw caps not corks, I'm not going to fight it. My Chateau Margot has a better environment, I assure you.

Thanks for the thoughts and sorry about the sizing goof.

Regards.

Tom

[dadiOH]

Changing the DPI changes the file and printing size but not the viewing size. To change viewing size you need to change the number of pixels; eg,

1280x1024 to 640x480.

[Tom Banes]

Thanks. Understood.

Tom

[Tom Banes]

Make the

Bob:

Thanks - good thought.

I increased the cross pieces to 1.5" and, as an added element, squared off the routed pins with a chisel. That way there's no need to undercut the tails. The shoulders are about 6X wider now, the tails are about 2X thicker at their smallest dimension, and I'm more comfortable.

I got a lot of advice on reducing the sizes of posted pics (not unwelcome, but some of the technical details were a bit simplistic. I mean, I could have erred and posted rasterized images), some not so uesful advice on how not to store wine (I currently have a few over 3K bottles in the cellar, mostly Premier Cru Bordeaux of the 80's and

90's), and one good idea that answered my question - yours.

Good advice is worth what you pay for it, sometimes it's free.

Care for a glass of '82 Piche Lalande Comtesse, a '78 Mouton, or possibly (OMG) a Yqem of the '49?

Regards.

Tom

[Edwin Pawlowski]

How about when someone pulls it out for cleaning or to retrieves something that got behind it? I guess that can be solved by putting a little stick that says "empty rack before pulling out".

[BobS]

Sounds like a plan...!

Bob S.

[JD]

The location over a refrigerator sounds like a potentially problematic idea for your project and for the wine. It will on average be warmer than the rest of the dwelling and of very changeable humidity, if the location of the cabinet is a kitchen. that could be hard on the wood, causing the joints to work, and hard on the wine. All my serious wine consuming friends insist on a cool temperature- less than 55 degrees F for their "cellars." Poking around with a search engine, the recommendations also mention a humidity of about 60 to 70 per cent for storage.

Good luck, JD