Hat Rack

For people who wear many hats

My brother's wife sent me a picture of a hat rack she found online and asked if I could make something similar. She wanted to give it to my brother as a gift, and I suspect she wanted to get some of his hats out of the way, too!

The design was quite simple, but I modeled it up anyway so I could have dimensions for myself. Here's what I worked up. Aside from guessing at the dimensions, it's almost identical to the image she sent me.

I had some Black Cherry wood on-hand, and I thought that would look nice. It consists of only five boards, and three of those boards are identical. The process of making the three main boards is quite simple, but a bit labor-intensive. After laying out and marking the boards, seven holes are drilled in each board. Then, the passageway where the hat will slide back into the hole is cut using the table saw. So that's twenty-one drilled holes, and forty-two cuts on the saw. It's no chest of drawers, but it's more than a few minutes.

All the rest of it is sanding and finishing, which is the worst part. It's difficult to get into all the nooks and crannies without getting runs in the finish (I think I finished it with a tung oil finish, which is a varnish). But after lots of finishing and some basic assembly, it looked like a hat rack!

And sometime later, I got another image from my sister-in-law. I tip my hat to whoever it is out there who came up with this design. It appears to hold many hats (well, probably just twenty-one).