I fell in love with woodworking a few years before I fell in love with guns. With no formal training of any kind, I've winged it as a hobbyist over the last 25+ years until most of my stuff no longer leans to one side or gives people splinters. Recently, I built two rifle racks, and figured I'd share the gory details here, over the next couple of posts.

First comes planning. I didn't do much of that. I had a 1 3/4" hole saw, and a 2 1/4" hole saw, and figured one of those would be good enough to drill some holes. I knew I wanted the holes to be big enough to accommodate an AR forearm, as I didn't want the rifles to generically rest on their barrels. I knew from general design principals that I wanted it to be about 28-32" high, and I wanted to keep it under two feet wide. I did some scratch paper math and came up with drilling the holes on 3" centers with about 2" of free space at the end of the boards. Figured I'd need about 12 board feet of rough lumber to do it. I thought I had enough walnut to do it on hand, but I was wrong. However, I had a bunch of rock maple left over for another project, and I figured it would be a nice contrast. I could have just bought planed and surfaced lumber at Home Depot or Lowes, but I have a ginormous jointer-planer who's sole job is to put rough lumber in one end and get milled lumber out the other, so I went with that.



Rough cut an appropriate chunk of walnut for the side stiles:


Split the rock maple down the middle for the rails. This stuff is very hard, dulls my tools quick, and burns easy, but it is very durable.


Next it's over to the jointer-planer, set on jointer mode. I ran the walnut plank across it's face until it was smooth and flat:


Then jointed it on the edge to get a flat surface milled 90?:


The jointer got it pretty close to square on the edge, but there were some dips and uneven-ness that it didn't come out perfect. I could have taken another couple passes, but that would have taken off more material than I wanted, and I only needed to correct a few areas.


So out came the #5 1/2 bench plane. Couple of paper-thin shavings in the spots that needed it:



And it came out square enough for wood work:


Cut the opposite rough edge off at the table saw, and I was ready to go: