Belt Rack
This is a quick project I did with some scrap wood, just for myself.
I didn’t even realize this would work, so there are no in-progress photos. It’s made of two pieces of scrap — one cherry about 8″ x 12″ and one walnut about 10″ x 5″.
Starting with the walnut, I measured one of my belts — it was 5/64″ thick — and cut slots with my regular table saw blade, raised about 2-3/4″, and equally spaced to make nine slots. But the squareness of it felt wrong, so I traced a bowed profile onto the front, cut that at the bandsaw, and smoothed it on the spindle sander to give it a more interesting shape. The sides are slightly tapered, too. And then I finished it off by using a block plane to chamfer the edges and a hand saw to notch the back corners in anticipation of fitting it into a dado.
Then I looked around and found a hunk of cherry about 6/4″ thick that I could resaw to get a pair of 5/8″ thick pieces from, each of which was 8 inches wide and a little over a foot long. I’ve actually started using a thin kerf ripping blade to start the resaw with, cutting 3 inches from each side, so at the bandsaw I only had a little bit of material to remove. I end up wasting less this way, as I can generally get the surfaces smooth in fewer planer passes. (I should probably practice with my hand planes and get that down even further.)
The cherry got a long chamfer on each edge (table saw set to 20 degrees and the piece run vertically) for looks, and then I routed a stopped dado below the midline. Again that was a style choice. Then I took it to the router table and put two screw slots in the back.
After hand sanding (it was easy, and the pieces were small), I glued the walnut into the cherry and let it dry. Since I still had some Arm-R-Seal mixed with thinner, I used that to finish the piece and hung it up to hold my collection of ratcheting belts.
This was a single-day solution that cost me nothing and went a long way toward clearing off the top of my nightstand. But it would probably make a nice gift, too.
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