Some of you may need wine racks, which you can find a multitude of designs on. However, I find that we go through more soda than wine in our house (I won’t argue on which one may be a healthier habit) so I decided to build a “Diet Coke Rack” for our garage to store bottles. This is especially helpful when you have a party and have way more bottles than normal.

Also, this post will be a good time for me to use some of my new Autodesk Fusion360 skills. Here’s a quick look at the model:

This is a pretty exciting time in CAD. Autodesk’s product is a HUGE improvement over the Sketchup that I have been using, and I LOVE the fact that it has CAM abilities built in to the free software. It’s just amazing.

Here’s how the project came together. First, I grabbed some 1x’s and cut some holes in them with a hole saw. Sounds simple enough, but this took a bit of time. These are 4.5″ diameter holes, set 5.5″ apart. The hole saw was getting dull towards the end. As you can see I have the 2 boards ganged together with clamps so the holes are cut in the same places. If you don’t have a hole saw of the right size, this would be a good project to use a router with a circle cutting jig. Or a jigsaw if you don’t have anything else.

Next came the cross pieces. Nothing fancy here, just more 1x’s cut to width. I chose 3.5″ wide spacing inside the rails, which seems to work fine. A little wider would be fine, too, but not narrower. 3.5″ seems to fit the curve of a Coke bottle, but the straight sided Pepsi bottles are easier to fit.

You can see the finished product to the left. I put spacers every 2 slots, just to keep the boards nice and parallel. Everything is glued together, and a couple of brad nails kept everything in place while the glue was drying.

I have a french cleat system in my garage, so this has my standard french cleat on the back, glued and screwed.

Of course, I had to load the rack up to full capacity on the first day, just to make sure it would hold. I chose to finish this off with some gray Minwax oil based stain. It took 2 coats to achieve this color. The pine looked really yellow through the first coat. Since this lives in the garage, I want it to match up with my eventual garage colors of Gray, Black, and Craftsman Red.

You may also see some Diet Coke lettering on the wood. I did this as an iron-on transfer from my laser printer. It worked pretty well, but it does have a pretty rustic look. Not a crisp, well-defined look. I’ll post a separate post about that in the near future.