I have a problem. You see, I wear hats. That's not actually the problem, but it is in some sense the source of the problem. The problem itself actually is that I have all these hats, and no place to store them, except in a kind of unkempt pile on the floor:
So, after having such good luck with the table that I built not too long before, I decided to build myself a rack on which to keep my hats. A hatrack, you might say. I decided to use 1/2" copper tubing to make it, as I needed something thin and light, and easy to work with. First, I bought these fittings:
And I also got some tools. They are, from left to right:
Here is the picture:
I also purchased some lengths of copper tubing, and cut them to the appropriate lengths:
Once all of the materials and implements were assembled, I began construction by putting the small "cap" fittings onto the ends of the shortest pipes. These will eventually form the hooks on which the hats will hang:
I then attached T-junction fittings to the opposite end of each short piece:
The next step is to construct the long cross-bars which will go lengthwise across the body of the rack, and will attach to the hooks upon which the hats will hang. However, while preparing for this step, I noticed a slight problem; not all of the medium-length pipe pieces had turned out to be exactly the same length:
Because of this, as I constructed the large cross-bars, I had to be very careful that I didn't allow the shorter sections of pipe to go all the way into the ends of the t-junctions that it connects to -- this is a way of "simulating" that it is actually as long as the longest piece. It worked out pretty well:
And then I put the pieces onto the end to connect the bar to one another. This again posed a challenge as I had to be sure all 3 bars wre exactly the same length at this point, so that it would be possible to connect the vertical pipe lengths in the next step. Luckily a little use of a straight edge made this fairly painless:
After this, it gets easy. Next, I put the top two bars together using two of the longest pipe sections:
And finally, the bottom bar attached to that:
Now I just hang it on the wall:
And hang the hats on it:
Overall, this was a pretty easy project. It took some time mainly due to problems finding enough Copper-Bond (I ended up using 5 tubes of the stuff), and the problem of having to wait 30 minutes after each piece connection. Also, the problem of me being very very lazy. One thing I will mention about Copper-Bond — it dries quickly and very hard. Here are some pictures of my workspace after a typical glueing of 6-7 different joints. It's hard to tell, but one of the wooden sticks actually managed to get dried standing up out of the pool of leftover Copper-Bond:
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