Making a coat rack from a buckthorn log

This project hit many of my interests:

• Eliminating buckthorn, a nasty invasive species
• Reuse / making things from leftovers
• Amateur woodworking
• Contributing to Workantile, the co-working community I’m a part of

It turned out nicely. Here’s a writeup and some photos.

The rack

It started when I was biking home with groceries from Meijer and encountered a big pile of buckthorn by the side of the road, culled from Greenview Nature Area and awaiting pickup for composting. The biggest trunk was a decent sized log. The bike was already heavily laden but fortunately, a log is a different shape than grocery bags so I found a spot for it:

For a while I’d been interested in woodworking with found wood, especially buckthorn. I take pleasure in removing it and would enjoy that even more if I could turn it into things. I asked my friend and de facto woodworking coach Chris how I should go about processing logs. Buy a bandsaw? Build one of those circular-saw-converted-to-chainsaw DIY mills I saw on YouTube? Both seemed excessive.

Chris pointed me toward a froe, an old-timey hand tool for the controlled splitting of wood. For my goal of splitting timber into boards, a froe fills the role of a bandsaw, and the tradeoffs suit me: quieter, safer, more in tune with the nature of the wood itself. It’s much cheaper and takes up almost no room. And bashing the froe with the mallet is a great workout.

Workantile, Ann Arbor’s member-run co-working space, lacked a coat rack, and I thought a split log would make for a nice DIY rack. This log looked like a good candidate. And even if it didn’t work out, using the froe is a fun way to spend some time outdoors and get better at it.

I’m still a beginner with the froe, but even so, this buckthorn trunk was easy to split cleanly:

This was fun, quick, and dust-free. The wood smelled wonderful upon being cracked open. At this point the piece of wood had obvious coat rack potential. And I’d gotten to use a little bit of skill, steering the froe to stay in the middle of the log.

Next up was smoothing it. Chris pointed me toward hand planes over a planer. Like the froe, the hand planes were just right for me and this job. They removed material much faster than I expected and I could follow the curvature of the wood.

After planing, it needed only very light sanding. I chose to leave the wood unfinished.

Once I had a split and smoothed half of a tree trunk, I just needed hooks. I visited the Kiwanis resale shop where they had sufficient quantity of only one kind of hook. Which made the decision easy.

I installed small blocks of scrap 2×4″ into Workantile’s masonry wall with Tapcon screws, then screwed the split buckthorn to the blocks. Staying true to the project, the screws were used as well, sourced from Kiwanis.

(I hope after I die, someone ends up with my drawer of random screws and puts them to use like I’m doing with these ones!)

Finally I mounted the hooks. And voila!

I split this buckthorn a few months ago and I’m hopeful that during that time it has dried enough not to check more and split where I’ve inserted screws.

Lessons learned

It went pretty well, but I’d change a few things next time:

• Minimize how visible the mounting blocks are and account for the fact that one is visible from the side.
• Mount it better. I should have planed the back flat to sit flush against each mounting block and used two screws to attach to each block, not one. As is, the rack wiggles a little.
• Use the right-sized small drill bit for the hook mounting screws. After I snapped off my last tiny drill bit during this project, I bought a mix of bits in the 1/16″-1/4″ range. In the future, I’ll carefully select the right bit so that I snap fewer of them and have an easier time inserting screws.

Overall, a casual and relaxing project that created a nice and functional piece of art! I still have the other side of the split trunk, a mirror image of the one pictured above. TBD what I’ll do with that one.

As always, if you’re in the area, you’re welcome to borrow my tools, in this case a hand plane or froe + mallet. If you’ve cut down or stumbled upon an interesting log, maybe it can become something marvelous.