It was winter and I was held up in the workshop with the pot belly stove going, a lot of steel bar and a pile of reclaimed western red cedar. So I started designing and making a very simple wine rack based on the Arthur Umanoff wine racks.

However unlike the Arthur Umanoff racks I made my steel rack the full depth of the bottle and offset the leather straps, this was to overcome the issue of bumping into the bottles when using the bench, and also to give a wider and more usable bench surface.

After an awful lot of cutting and welding things started coming together… keeping this perfectly square was a trick, and having a perfectly flat concrete slab was invaluable.

The red cedar came from a set of screen doors from a demolition, after knocking the doors apart, I de-nailed them with a metal detector and dressed them up through the thicknesser. Remember to use a dust extractor with red cedar as it causes quite bad allergic reactions, and some people are affected worse than others.

A a fine sand, and a few coats of danish oil applied with fine steel wool and the thing came up a treat. I found some surplus cow hides locally that I stripped down into straps, and attached them with pop rivets and washers that I’d given a quick coat of black paint.