Cookie Racks



Girlfriend says:  "Let's make cookies!"  Who can refuse?   First off, one must accommodate the female of the species.  At my age, finding a good replacement may be difficult.  Secondly, I like food.   Food is good.  Thirdly, it makes us both more popular at work when we bring something edible.  Especially rich, sweet edibles.

So I got Mr. Quaker out of the fridge, scrounged up ingredients and we made a nice batch.  It was a pleasure, with one exception.  I have no cooling racks.

Cookies are best when cooled on racks, so the moisture of the hot cookie does not collect underneath, making them soggy on the bottom.  No pudding-bottomed cookies for me!  

My only usable racks were borrowed from the toaster oven.  Only two of them, and they were small.  We had to shift cookies from oven to rack for their preliminary cooling, then stack them at an angle on one of the extra pans.  Guess we could have used one of the oven racks, but they were needed in the oven, of all places.  

So I got this notion that I could make cookie racks out of the pile of wood lying around.  Oak dowels, primarily.  

My first two racks worked.  That's about the best I can say for them.  

Third time I happened upon with this design:, which is much better:



It is composed of two 18-inch sections of 1 inch diameter dowel, connected with 35 quarter-inch dowels each about 1 foot long.

Kerfs for the dowels were first made using a dado blade.  The ends are hammered in with a little Titebond III and after a good drying, sanded round.

But this puts round pegs into square holes.  I filled the gaps with glue so they are not obvious from a distance, but they are ugly up close.  

I put three blades on the table-saw.  It cut squarer square holes.

Here is one made that way using poplar -

 
The glue fillets are more obvious with the lighter wood.  

I tried rounding the holes with a circular file in the drill press... which often messed up the nice clean edges of the kerf.  

It worked a little better using a Forstner bit to round the bottom:


Good result, but the method was very time-consuming.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I made a couple using the router table to square off 3 sides of each dowel.  

Here's how that looks:



Square peg fits square hole nicely, and it is much less trouble than the Forstner-bit method.  



Click Here for a 4-minute movie I've made showing parts of the procedure.  (24 meg .wmv file) I promise I'll finish it one day!

As you can see, it only takes about 5 seconds to cut each kerf, and maybe 15 seconds to square-off a dowel.  

But I like the round holes, and the additional work with the router table nearly doubles the time required to assemble one of these.  

So I continue the search for a method that is as quick and easy as the 3-blade table saw, but creates a clean, round-bottomed kerf.  

Suggestions?  Ideas?  Rude remarks?  I'm open for any of these.

Continued December 10th  


Thanks to some great suggestions from the guys on Woodworking Talk, I've made some progress toward the ideal.

1.  Cut a 2x4 a little longer than the 18 inch dowel
2.  Drilled 1/4th inch holes down the middle
3.  Drilled 1/4th inch holes 7/16ths inch from the middle, spaced 1/2 inch apart for the length of the dowel
4.  Trimmed top and bottom nice and flat.
5.  Ripped off the bottom 1/3rd
6.  Made deep V-grooves in both halves.  

Enough talk.  Time for some photos.  

   

To use:
A.  18 inch section of dowel is centered in the jig
B.  The halves are joined, and 1/4th inch screws used to secure the far ends, clamping the dowel in tight.
C.  1/4th inch holes are drilled at either end of the dowel (through the holes that are already there in the jig.)
D.  1/4th inch screws are inserted to lock the dowel in place, prevent it from rotating.  
E.  Forstner bit used to drill each hole
F.  Jig is opened up, dowel removed.  It's real ugly at this point, but a minute on the belt sander makes it all better.  

The rest of the 2x4 wanted to help, so I dado-ed a wide kerf to accommodate the screws poking down.  
By lucky accident, it fits the washers on the screws nicely, and so provides a guide as well as support.  

   

This guide is made from soft wood, so I don't expect it will last very long.  Plus some of the holes are a little bit off, so I'll make another one from harder wood and with more care.   Perhaps Delrin would work better than wood?  Aluminum?  

Another helpful device... the Clamp Table.  Just a piece of plywood on legs, to give the clamps a little clearance off the table top.  

 

These clamps are just the right width to hold two dowels down at a time.  The new grooves are shallow enough that the dowels usually go in under finger pressure.  A few require light tapping, but not much more, so the wood does not get damaged by heavy pounding.  




The end result is one of the nicer of my racks, made much more easily than by previous methods.

But the quest continues for a round kerf-cutter to fit my table saw.  This method is good, but far more time-consuming than cutting kerfs on the table saw.  


Jimmy Yawn
December 11, 2013
jyawn@sfcc.net