Sword Rack

This is just cool. The first purely decorative piece I've ever built, my sword rack gives me a place to store, obviously, my sword collection.

It's designed to show off the swords, while protecting them and passers-by simultaneously.

Felt lined sheathes in the rack keep the swords from being scuffed or scratched.

Some more details of its construction are Below

Pictures

Here's the sword rack: notice the bunny skin mounted on the top.

Another shot with a clearer view of the feet. The diagonal brace keeps the structure from becoming a parallelogram.

Here's a closer view of the felt-lined sheaths. The felt's kept on with spray adhesive.

Construction

Basically, my design centers around two upright 2x2's supported by feet. Crosspieces (one at the top, one around waist height, and one at the bottom) run between the two uprights to hold them together.

The uprights are 72" (6') from tip to bottom. The crosspieces are 53" long from end to end.

The swords slide through rectangular holes in the top crosspiece, and rest in a long felt-lined trough in the bottom of the sword rack. The two crossbeams are 14" apart, so it works out that about 20" of the swords' blades are in the rack.

There are 13 places for swords in the rack, although since each hole is 2" wide and only 1.5" seperates them, fewer swords will actually fit in the rack (the hilts would interfere with each other.

The tops of the uprights were pointed using a chop saw set to 45°.

The top crossbeam is just for show and stability, and is basically a single 1x4 (The angled boards and the mounted rabbit skin are just for show, and add no structural support).

The center crossbeam is two 1x4's, seperated with a number of short pieces of 1x2 sandwiched between. This makes a bunch of rectangular vertical channels that the swords slide into. These I lined with felt applied with spray adhesive to protect the swords sliding through.

The bottom crossbeam is two 1x4's, and sandwiched between is a long 1x2 across the bottom, and two 1x2's at the end. This creates a long trench that the points of the swords can rest in. I lined this with felt the same way as I did the center crossbeam.

The whole piece was made out of construction-grade spruce, sanded and stained, and detailed with stenciled fleur-de-lis in black on the center crossbeam.

The feet were a tricky bit. You can see a bad picture of one of the feet above. The feet are two 1x4's, a couple of feet long, with a 2x4 sandwiched between them. A 2" gap was removed from the center of the 2x4, making a 2x2 hole for the upright to socket into. If that's not explained poorly, I don't know what is. I can't explain without pictures.

The ends of the feet were angled a bit for aesthetics.

My design has some advantages: the sword points are contained in the lower trench, and are supported somewhere along their width. It's very secure, and swords are unlikely to fall out onto kids or dogs (a problem in my house). The sword hilts are at an easy reach-level, and are on clear display, which is nice.

If you have any questions, mail me and I'll try to make things clearer.