The Antler Coat Rack

Over the last few years, I've collected a fair amount of antlers. Some where given to me, some where found while shed hunting, and some where found still attached the skull (whether road kill or wolf-kill). Regardless, there've been more than a few times that I've been asked what I plan to do with them. Part of my just wants to keep them out of fascination. Another part of me is ignorant as to how to take on an "antler project". Well this Christmas, I set out on my first attempt at making something out of them.
We desperately needed a coat rack as we were pilling our jackets on the backs of chairs and throughout the living room. I had a set of nice dark Muley antlers that came off a roadkill buck in Saskatchewan. The skull plate was already broken, so there really wasn't much a person could do with the antlers anyway.
I started by looking online for a place to find a nice board to mount the antlers on. I wanted something with character and color. I started looking through walnut and some other woods, but settle on Eastern Red or Aromatic Cedar. There were several companies that were selling slabs that were huge (intended for bar counter tops and mantle pieces, etc) and not too many that were selling smaller pieces like I was wanting. Finally, I found a perfect piece, bought it for 27.99 or so on eBay and it came in the mail just a few days later. I kept all this a secret from Steph so she would have an 'unknown' Christmas present.

I opened it up and was pleasantly surprised at the color and the smell. Cedar smells soooo good. The piece was about 44" long and about 9" wide at its widest.

The first step was to get a few coats of varnish on it. I used a satin finish, clear varnish and applied three coats to each side of the board. Here's coat number 1:

Coat #2:

Coat #3

After it was varnished to my liking, we took the antlers and the board over to my grandpas where we used a ban saw to get the angles of the bases as close as we could. This was a tricky process, because there was no way to be 100% accurate in getting the cut perfect, because you had to hold the antler above the board, draw pencil lines and then hopefully replicate that angle on the ban saw. Once we had it as close as possible, we set the cut antler on the board and marked the base attachment point and the G2 attachment point with a pencil.

After we had the anchor points marked, we were able to take the rough cuts of the antler over to the belt sander to make sure that antler laid perfectly flat.

Once we had them both cut, marked to the board, and sitting nice and flat, we took the board and the antlers home to start drilling.

We knew the bases would need two screws and the G2s would need one. The more spots where the beam touches the board, the more secure you can make it with additional anchor points. We started by marking Xs with a pencil inside the place we marked earlier where the base of the antler will sit and where we wanted the anchor point drilled for the G2. We first started with a regular drill bit that fit the shaft of the screw threads. We made our drill holes all the way through.

Then we made a second drill with a router bit in order to put washers in so the screw heads would have a place to catch.

Once we had all the holes drilled in the board, we switched back to the smaller bit and I held the antler in place while dad slowly drilled a small pilot hole into the actual antler through our previously drilled hole. We got our screws and washers put together and screwed them in with some epoxy on the threads of the screws to ensure a good hold. We sucked them up really tight so there would be absolutely no 'play' in the antler.

The finished product was very good, considering it was our first time attempting anything like it. We decided to use keyhole cuts on the bad that were spaced at 16" so to fit the studs on any given wall. Since the board was not cut or shaped to a perfect 90 degrees, it was a little difficult to figure out how to get the keyholes cut so to make the coat rack sit level when both the top and bottom have slopes to them. We did our best and it looks really nice and is getting plenty of use! Merry Christmas, Steph!