Home » Episode » Design and Fabrication » Building a Dr. Seuss Inspired Coat Rack

Building a Dr. Seuss Inspired Coat Rack

Turning a 4×4 Inside Out

This design came from wanting to finally try a technique I’d been sitting on for about a decade. Years ago, I was watching a show called Redwood Kings, where a couple of guys built these wild treehouses out of redwood stumps and salvaged material. At one point, one of them demonstrated how to take a straight 4×4 and turn it into a crooked, twisted post using nothing but a band saw. He basically turned the board inside out. I’d seen a few other people show the technique on YouTube over the years, but I’d never seen anyone actually build it into a real piece of furniture. The trick itself is simple once you know it, but figuring out a project where it made sense was the hard part. Eventually I landed on a coat rack, something inspired by Dr Seuss, those whimsical illustrations in all those books I read as a kid and to my kids.  I think this piece would work great in the entryway for a Denver client who needed custom furniture.

Starting Straight So It Ends Up Straight

Even though this post was about to get cut apart and reassembled crooked, I still took the time to lay out my joinery lines on the straight 4×4 first. It seems backwards.  The joinery needs a straight reference to work from; otherwise the finished coat rack won’t actually stand up straight once it’s back together. So step one was working from a straight cut even though those original layout lines would end up buried inside the finished post.

For the curves, I used a bucket as my template. Nothing fancy.  I just wanted something with a consistent radius so the curves would stay visually consistent as they worked their way up the post. From there I eyeballed the start and stop points until I had a shape that felt right.

Before cutting any of the curves, I ran it against the fence on the band saw to cut some straight sections into the blank first. Those flat spots are what the joinery for the arms will eventually land on, so I needed them established before I started cutting curves everywhere.

The Inside-Out Cut

Here’s the actual technique: you cut the curve on one face of the 4×4, then tape the two halves back together and flip the board to cut the same curve on the adjacent side. That leaves you with four separate pieces total. Then you rearrange the pieces. Take the piece that was on the right side and move it to the left. Take the piece that was on top and put it on the bottom. Reassemble them in that new order and suddenly a straight board has become a curvy, almost organic-looking post.

Because I wanted everything to line up cleanly, I glued the whole post up in one shot rather than doing it in stages. That meant I needed a lot of clamping pressure all at once.  I didn’t have enough clamps, or the right-shaped clamps, to cover every glue line on a piece with this many curved surfaces. So I improvised with rope. Wrapping rope around the post and twisting it tight works surprisingly well as a clamp, and it lets you apply pressure basically anywhere, even on odd curved sections where a normal clamp has nothing to grab onto. The rope ran me about 15 bucks at the hardware store, which is a lot cheaper than buying a pile of clamps.

Shaping the Top and Cutting the Arm Joinery

The plan for the top was eight arms, each one hanging a coat, coming off eight flat facets. To get there, I needed to turn the post into an octagon, so I cut a flat spot on what would become the eighth face. At that stage, I left the transitions between the facets alone rather than trying to blend them right away.  You can always take more material off later, but you can’t put it back, so I wanted to hold off on deciding exactly how to ease those transitions until I could see the whole thing coming together.

Once the octagon shape was established, I switched router bits and used the same jig I’d been using to cut mortises for the coat rack arms into each facet. I clamped a couple of runners onto either side of the jig so it could slide along consistently, which kept all eight mortises aligned in the center of each facet.

The Base: A Castle Joint Cut by Hand

For the base, I used a castle joint; think of it as a cross between a half-lap and a bridle joint. The pieces involved were too tall and unwieldy to run through the table saw safely, so I cut that joint by hand with a Japanese pull saw instead.

If you’ve never used one, the best advice I can give is to stick to one hand. It’s tempting to grab the saw with both hands once your arm gets tired, but that’s actually the beginner move.  Using two hands throws your body mechanics out of line with the cut, and you’ll wander off your line almost immediately. One hand, and if your arm gets tired, stop and take a break rather than switching to two. You’ll hit your line every time that way.

After the saw cuts, I cleaned out the waste in the middle with a chisel. For the other half of the castle joint, I switched to a dado stack on the table saw, set to the right depth, and cut right up to a knife line. I did a test fit before committing to the half-lap portion, then marked that joint with a knife as well before cutting it.

Before I called the base joinery done, I wanted to add a decorative shape to it rather than leaving it plain, so I cut a profile into the base pieces to dress them up a bit.  These are the kind of details that can only be accomplished by a Custom Furniture Maker.

Figuring Out the Arms

For the arms, I mocked up a bunch of different lengths and widths out of plywood scraps just to get a feel for proportions before committing to actual material. I wanted to see what would look right visually, not just what would technically work. One length felt too long, especially once you picture an actual coat hanging on it.  So I sized down from there until I landed on a length that felt balanced.

Design-wise, I wanted a rounded front on each hook, then some kind of swoop or notch near the top so a coat wouldn’t slide right off, and a shaped bottom edge so it wasn’t just a plain, boring board. I cut the tenons for the hooks at the table saw with a dado stack before cutting any of the curved shapes, then cut them to width and used the band saw to remove the bulk of the waste material around the curves. Doing that rough shaping at the band saw first meant less tear-out and less work for the router later, since it wasn’t trying to hog off a ton of material in one pass.

Feet That Match the Arms

For the feet, instead of designing a whole new shape from scratch, I reused the arm profile. I took that same hook shape, flipped it upside down, and added a small spacer underneath to lift the middle off the ground.  You don’t want the center of the base touching the floor, or the whole coat rack can rock. Flipping that shape over gave me a foot that tied visually back into the arms up top, which felt like the right call rather than inventing something unrelated.

Cleanup

Once everything was glued and assembled, there was a fair amount of clean-up work left.  Glue squeeze-out and band saw marks were all over the curved surfaces. I used a power carving tool to clean all of that up and smooth things out.

Wrapping Up

The coat rack turned out pretty great, in my opinion. My wife, on the other hand, has let me know she’s not a fan of this particular design. So there may be a second coat rack build in my future, or possibly a new wife. We’ll see how that goes. Thanks for watching.

Custom Sculpted Coat Rack

Shopping Cart