Beer Glass Holder

If you want to save space in your kitchen and stack your beautiful beer glasses in a stylish way, this instructables is for you !

The building only needs basics tools, such as :

- Jigsaw

- Circular saw

- Drill

- Sander / Sand paper

-(facultative but useful : a plane)

Obviously, if you have better tools like a table saw or a miter saw, it'll make your work much more easier.

The materials needed are also pretty basic :

- A pallet

- A few wooden dowels (0.8mm diameter)

- A wooden bar (1m long x 0.8mm diameter)

- Wood glue.

Let's start !

I first made some basic drawings of the structure, to give me an idea of what it will look like.
You need then to measure the height and diameter of your glasses, and choose the number of glasses you want to pile up. Then you're able, after a very complicated calculation, to determine how high your pillars need to be.

I also made a model in Solidworks, to check the design with different measures. Check the pictures to see the dimensions I choose, it's up to you then !

I used some old pallet wood for the pillars, as you can see a quite thin one. You can directly cut the four 40cm planks you need with a saw.
Ajust the width (second picture) by cutting it straight with your circular saw. You can use another plank clamped next to it to make a cutting guide, so you'll be sure to cut straight. If you have a miter saw or a table saw it'll be even easier for you !

Get then another piece of timber for the base, about 2.5 cm thick, and cut it following the shape of your paper template using your jigsaw.

Get your manual or electrical plane, and make those planks look nice ! You can directly sand them if you want, but if you have bad quality planks like me the plane is very quick and gives some quite good results. Just be careful not to remove too much wood, otherwise your planks will be too thin to be drilled in the next steps.

Sand them quickly if you used a plane.

Do the same thing with the piece of timber for the base.

I glued some dowels to fix the pillars to the base, so you first need to drill the holes to put the dowels. I first thought to put 2 dowels per pillar, but it turned out 1 was enough to make the structure strong and was much easier to do.

Measure your pillar's width, and mark where you need drill on the base to make the dowel ending in the middle of the pillar. Then drill with the correct bit corresponding to your dowel (I used here an 8mm diameter).

Now the tricky part is to make the pillars perfectly match with the side of your base.

The technique I used is simple :

- put a dowel inside the hole you drilled in the base before

- clamp your pillar on a vice

- place the base on the top of the pillar, in the right position (the side of the base and of the pillar must be lined up)

- get a hammer and hit the dowel to make it mark the pillar

- take off the base

- drill the pillar on the mark you just made with your dowel (if you want to drill it just the right deep, you can put a little piece of adhesive tape on your bit to mark the length of a dowel (second picture), so you'll now when you have to stop when you'll drill).

Put everything together, and you should have now a perfectly lined up pillar, congrats !

If it's not the case, a bit of sanding will hide your little mistakes and smooth the transition between the two pieces.

Repeat then the process for the three others pillars.

I didn't take any picture of the bar I bought, sorry ! The picture is just a random one found on the internet.

You need 3*2 = 6 little wooden bars per side, so 6*3 = 18 bars in total (only three sides have bars, the fourth side has to be open for the beer glasses handles).

In my case, following the plans I made in the first step, my bars had to be between 5 and 6 cm to fit into the pillars.

With a 1 meter bar, you can make 18 bars of 5.5 cm, perfect for me !

If you took different dimensions as me (depending of your glasses), you can measure on your drawing to scale the minimum and maximum length of your bars.

Once you know the length needed, cut your long bar into little ones.

Now here's the (really) tricky part. If you have good tools such as a drill press or something to drill at 45°, it'll be cake for you, but if you only have a simple drill brace yourself !

The goal is to drill holes at 45° in the pillars to put your little wooden bars between them.

Make first some marks on the side of the pillars at the desired height. Try to do this as precisely as you can, because the holes have to be exactly at the same height on each pillar, otherwise you'll see the difference when you'll set up your bars : they won't be straight.

Here are the steps to drill for the firsts pillar :

- Clamp your pillar on a vice

- Put the base on it (first picture)

- Drill first just a little straight hole (a technique I found with time which worked pretty good, look pictures 4 and 5)

- Place your drill in the alignment of the side of the base (second picture)

- Drill your holes a 45°, but drill not too deep, don't go all the way through ! You can use the adhesive tape technique I explained before if you want to be sure not to go too deep.

- Take off the first pillar, put the second one on and repeat the same steps

- Once everything is drilled, try now to put in place your bars

If you're good everything will fit perfectly and you can directly glue the pillars to the base and the bars to the pillars.

But if you're like me, you'll probably have some little arrangements to do.. See it in the next step !

So as you could see in the last picture of the previous step, everything didn't go as planned for me and some bars looked quite bad.. To fix this and make it look straight, I drilled the holes again, a little bit higher was too low on one side, or lower if it was too high. It's a very annoying step, but be careful doing it, you can easily make a mistake and split the wood.

You can see the result on the picture. Don't worry about the gaps we see around the bar holes, we'll fill them with wood paste later.

Once your bars fit good in your pillars, you can finally glue !

Start by gluing the pillars to the base, and glue straight ahead the bars to the pillars.

Let the glue dry as said on your glue pot.

Go back to step 7 and drill again for the other pillars.

The only different thing is you now have something glued to the base, so you can't always use it as a guide for your drills (as in the first picture).

The trick I used was just to fix a protractor on the top of the pillar to drill at 45° (second picture). It's still imprecise, but better than nothing !

Adjust each bar with new holes when it's necessary, and glue like previously each time you're done with one side.

As I drilled many holes to adjust the height of the bars, there was a few gaps to fill. Moreover, the wood was split in some places and the pillars weren't perfectly placed.

The solution is very simple : wood paste !

Mix the powder with water, and apply into the holes and cracks.

Let it dry, and then sand to make it look nice.

Now if you're satisfied with you work, you can oil or varnish it and you're done !

But if you still have some little defaults, white paint will hide them all. See next step!

As I said before, white paint is great to hide defaults, especially the color difference between your natural wood color and the wood paste. That's why I chose to paint it in white.

Paint it, let it dry, and you're done, congrats !

I hope you enjoyed this instructables, have fun !