The Last Rod Rack

I can't even remember when I designed and built my first rod rack (for myself), but it is still with me, and is made out of leftover lengths of longleaf heart pine we used for flooring in the house we built in South Carolina, so it was quite some years ago. Since that first rack, I've made quite a few for folks, most of whom came to me via the the Classic Fly Rod forum. All have been built out of white pine; I like working with it, and, finished correctly, it is beautiful and can stand the test of time. All of the gentlemen I have worked with on these have been delightful customers; probably the best part of building the things. Each had a different set/number of rods to be accomodated in a rack, so we worked together to get a design that was functional and pleasing to the eye. I believe we have a one hundred percent success rate along those lines. Having said all that, this post is about the last rack I'll build for anyone other than myself (cherry for our Miramichi river camp sometime in the future). A rack takes a week of my life from start to finish...and while I hope I have more than a few weeks left on this earth, I've decided I just don't want to spend any of those weeks building rod racks. And if I charged what I really think my time is worth, no one in their right mind would buy one from me...and I've built racks for some very generous guys. The fellow I built this last rack paid me more than I asked him for, and even padded his payment for freight pretty significantly which was much appreciated. Anyway, on to the rack. The customer stated from the outset that he wanted it made out of redwood...and that he would supply the wood. Shortly after we agreed we'd build the rack, this eight foot package arrived at our door (click on the pic for a larger version)

It contained incredibly straight, clear redwood:

We worked together on a design for the tube holes that had a good look and could handle the rods he had. This photo shows what we settled on; you can see that I moved the centerline of the smaller holes to center them on the top and bottom plates of the rack. I tape the template to the top and bottom and use an awl to transfer the center of each hole to the wood.

Here is the glued-up top with its hole locations (that clear redwood is some beautiful, but it SO soft. If you even look at it wrong, it dents. Don't ask me how I know.)

The fun begins: drilling out all those holes:

There is a price to be paid for all that drilling if you use forstner bits (I don't anymore):

Sanding the inside of those holes used to be quite a chore. I bought an oscillating spindle sander that really eased that burden; I'm sure I'll find other uses for it sometime.

A router with a little 3/16" roundover bit makes for a nice, neat presentation.

The uprights for this rack presented a problem. With white pine racks, I was always able to match an edge to a face of the thing to make it look like one piece, like this and glue up pretty easily:

The redwood didn't cooperate; it was pretty much flat sawn, so an edge of a board looked way different than the face of the board.

So the easy upright devolved into cutting the pieces with a forty five degree edge so that when glued up, both faces looked the same. Glue-up wasn't simple, either.

The entire rod rack process is pretty clamp-intensive. Here the base is being glued up:

Finally, all the pieces of the puzzle assembled and awaiting final assembly and sanding:

I was in a bit of a hurry to get up to the Miramichi to get started on our camp, so didn't take the time to get a nifty photo of the final outcome. This will have to do:

As I said at the outset of this post, it was a pleasure to work with such great folks on their rod rack projects. But I'm done...having a much bigger fish to fry:

Cheers, Gary