Skate Drying and Storage Racks
What goes into the making of Premium Skate Racks - step-by-step
This style wall-mounted skate holder was created to solve a chronic problem with rust on my own blades. When stored in soakers on the floor, rust would form on the blades, especially during humid summer months. Since I began using it, the problem has disappeared. It removes the skates from the floor where I would trip on them, and looks tidy and organized.
The steps that follow document the making of these racks. They required some advanced woodworking tools for fabrication, but I'm sure other approaches could work too.
I envisioned a fairly large circular background for these (over 14" diameter) to prevent boots from rubbing the paint on the walls, plus the extra generous portion of hardwood adds an upscale appearance.
Because the diameter of the rack is to be over 14", I crosscut some boards to be somewhat longer than that. The width was another problem though. Most wood available is not 14" wide, so a glue-up of three typical boards is necessary to reach the target width. With the cherry boards and the walnut boards in this batch of three racks, positioning the individual boards for attractive wood grain matching at the joints was easy. With the curly maple, the distinct bands looked odd where the shimmering grain pattern met at the joints.
Because of the discontinuities at the joints, some cherry strips were cut on the tablesaw to be inserted between the maple boards. This provides a visual edge that looks nicer than the curly maple joined to itself. This made the maple rack more difficult to create though, but it was worth it in the end.
To accurately join the individual wooden boards together, I used a combination of biscuits and dowels. Either used alone would work well enough, but sometimes it's nice to broaden approaches to work like this. The center maple board shown below is having biscuit slots cut using a custom jig. After that, the cherry strip is cut also, and biscuits inserted to align the work edges on one side.
The biscuits are coated with wood glue, and inserted into the biscuit slots cut in the previous step. The edges receive glue too. If clamped together sufficiently for several hours, the glue joint will be stronger than the wood itself.
Gluing a strip of cherry (nearly hidden on the left edge by the forest of clamps!). This will sit undisturbed for several hours.
Once the second strip is glued, the outside cherry edges get planed in a special jig that ensures perfectly square mating edges. This is essential for gluing the outside maple boards and having no gaps appear in the joint.
To align the outside maple boards to the center board with the cherry strips, I drilled dowel holes in the edges. The dowels pass through the cherry strip into the center maple board. This adds tremendous strength, and aids alignment of the board faces in the next gluing step.
Shown below, one of the outside maple boards is being glued to the center. When this one dried completely (24 hours), the final board was glued in the same way.
Regardless of whether biscuits or dowels are used, there will be some surface leveling needed. Smoothing the height differences in the panel is the realm of the plane. It makes short work of it, and makes a flatter surface than sandpaper used alone.
To get perfectly round racks, a piece of MDF was routed to the desired diameter with a circle jig on a router. When mounted to the wooden blanks, this circular pattern will serve as a template for trimming each of them into perfect matching circles. The round MDF pattern attaches via a steel pin in a blind hole drilled on the back side of each of the racks.
The photo below shows the panels ready to be cut into circles. The first stop is the bandsaw to rough-cut them slightly oversized.
Their round shape was traced with a pencil, and the parts were taken to a bandsaw where they were rough cut slightly oversize. The bandsaw leaves rough edges and the shapes aren't perfect circles, but they will be trimmed using the MDF pattern on a router table.
A 1/2" diameter Forstner bit mounted in the drill press cut the square-bottom, blind holes for the pegs. After drilling them, I changed to a much smaller bit to drill through-holes so that small #4 screws could pull in the pegs tightly from the back. The smaller holes were countersunk on the rear so that screw heads would be flush with the surfaces.
A flush-trim bit used in the router table trimmed the oversized, bandsaw-cut wooden blanks to exactly the same size as the round MDF template. Trimming to shape is relatively fast (less than 10-minutes each) compared to routing each circle individually using a circle jig on a handheld router.
Once the disk is a perfect circle that matches the MDF pattern, they are separated. A chamfer bit is installed in the router table to cut the decorative edge on the wooden disks. A ball-bearing on the top of the bit rides on the outside of the disk. While the photo below shows the finished chamfer in the wood facing up, it's actually cut face-down. It takes about 10-minutes to cut the chamfer. Light passes are necessary to prevent tearout of the wood surface, and the router bit is incremented upward several times to reach the desired depth of cut.
Below are the three completed racks before any finish is applied. I made a little stand to hold the pegs so that they could be finished without dropping them.
Finishing is where the visual magic happens.
Each rack received a coat of de-waxed shellac to serve as a seal coat. Once that dried, each rack got at least one coat of Danish Oil to "pop" the grain. Because of the bluish tint of the walnut, I used a "Golden Oak" (yellowish) formulation of Danish Oil to warm the color. It worked perfectly. Natural color original formula Danish Oil was applied the maple and cherry racks. It takes about 24-hours drying time between coats. The walnut received perhaps 6 coats of Danish Oil and it looked wonderful with the natural texture of the wood. I did not overcoat the walnut rack with additional finish in order to preserve the hand-rubbed appearance. It didn't need anything further.
The others received additional coats of General Finishes Arm-R-Seal oil-based finish. Arm-R-Seal builds a film rapidly compared to the rubbing oil, and can build to a high sheen. I used semi-gloss for both the cherry and the maple racks. The cherry looked good after three coats, but I wanted the maple to achieve a much higher sheen, so several additional coats were used on it. It built to nearly a glass-smooth finish. Almost. I didn't want to go overboard and make it look like plastic.
This is the walnut, and it displays some chatoyance in directional light when viewed at different angles. It's gorgeous and understated.
Here's the curly maple with cherry strips at the joints. The curly pattern shimmers dramatically in directional light when viewed at different angles. It resembles the way silk catches light. This rack has a flamboyant character.
The cherry has a smooth, fine-grain appearance, and its warm color is appealing. With continued exposure to light, cherry may darken over time to a rich, deep-warm color.
After finishing, I attached the pegs and fitted split flexible tubing onto the bottom peg to protect it from blade abrasion.
...and here are the skate racks ready to go to work.
In case you found this web page without knowing what a rack looks like in use, here's my prototype that I built a couple years ago for my own skates. It's mounted to a large heavy steel bookcase. The wood was soft maple, and it was finished with Arm-R-Deal. I've not had one bit of trouble with rust since I started using it, and it goes without saying that it's much better looking than skates in a pile on the floor.
Note that there are some unconventional skate blades in use now. I'm unsure how they will work with the rack, but that can be verified by simple measurements.
These racks were designed to be used with adult-sized skates. I've measured some skates used by teenagers, and they work too. However, the peg spacing on these is too large for a small child's skates. Smaller racks for children's skates may be a project for another day.
Bill Schneider
July 2014