Rifle Rack

[JohnnyEgo]

I had a shoot this weekend where I had promised to bring an assortment of demo guns and oddities. I had intended to build a portable rifle rack for years, but somehow never got around to it. Figured this would be the motivation I needed to pump out a one-day project. All went well until I decided to try my hand at hand-cutting mortise and tenon joints, then it turned into a tragi-comic misadventure of mismeasurement, mistakes, and cutting dutchmen. Also at one point, I am pretty sure every piece had an unanticipated trip to the shop floor. But I learned a lot in the process of making it and fixing the mistakes, and it served my purposes perfectly, despite not having been built perfectly. Walnut and Rock Maple:







The little shelf on one side is a riser for short rifles, and is held in just by gravity. Worked pretty well, and more stable than I would have initially thought.

In use:

[Phil Thien]

Wow that looks awesome!

It really complements the rifles. Or the other way around.

[BrokenOlMarine]

Johnny, love the walnut and maple combo.

[Tony Z]

Looks dayam good to me! Would be a week project for me!

[stav]

It looks great. Classic wood combo.

[fredhargis]

I do like the way that turned out. I've had one on my build list for a very long time (not nearly as elaborate as yours), maybe it's time to get 'er done.

[AHill]

Nice job on the rack. I was expecting to see a lot of hunting rifles, but then I see you are into area defense weapons. Home defense at its finest.

[JohnnyEgo]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone!

Johnny, love the walnut and maple combo.

Great minds have similar taste in contrasting wood, my friend!

Looks dayam good to me! Would be a week project for me!

It ended up being about a week-long project for me, too. I got 90% of it done in 12 hours on a Sunday. The only thing left was to attach the slip rails to the back of the stiles to give it a little more rigidity. If I had just pegged them, I would have been all done but for the finish in one day. But instead, I decided to hand-cut my first mortises ever. The rails have two tenons on the ends, and two mortises for floating tenons along the long edge. So eight handcut mortises. On Monday night, I cut two of them with varying degrees of success, and then cut a third one that was absolutely beautiful, until I realized I had cut it on the wrong side of my scribe line. On Tuesday night, I cut a dutchman for it, and this time marked both sides of my scribe line for the remaining mortises.



On Wednesday night, I planed the dutchman down and filled the visible seams with sawdust and glue. It was the inside corner, mostly covered by the tenon shoulders, and I took a moment of pride that I had salvaged a bad situation with a reasonably discrete fix. Now that I had marked all of my mortises clearly, I knew the rest would be easy sailing. I started cutting mortises again, and noticed they were going a lot cleaner and faster now that I had marked them out completely and had a bit of practice. So clean and fast that I cut a mortise that I had perfectly marked on the wrong side of the board:



On Thursday night, I had a Cub Scout function. So Friday night, I cut another dutchman. On Saturday morning, I did assembly and glue. Saturday evening, I put two coats of Watco Danish on it, because it was the only finish I was reasonably sure would dry by Sunday morning when I put it in use. So my 12 hour, one day project turned into an 18 hour week long debacle that finished at the last possible minute.

[Admiral]

Very nice and a good design. I have to be a bit jealous, however. As I am in NJ, the mere possession of most of the pieces in the pic would end me up in jail..... especially the supressors. Plus, now we are limited to 10 round magazines.

[Bill Holt]

Smart design.  I built one for my neighbor several years ago.  It was one sided. He received so many comments at the range he wanted to produce them at the amazing price of $99.  He said "WEEE" will make a killing!"  I said no thank you.