In early 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic my team was laid off by a company that had made some bad decisions, found itself overextended, and panicked. Needing to find something to occupy ourselves my hand and I decided to built the pot rack that I had been promising my wife for 20 years.

Here is how we did it.

This is my hand. She first visited us two years before to make maple syrup and stayed for a month. She visited three or four times then came to stay in the spring of 2020, again to make maple syrup, and ended up stuck at our homestead during the initial covid panic and travel restrictions. She was an aircraft maintenance quality manager who had never welded before. This is the project where I taught her and she cut her teeth.

The pot rack is a simple rectangle with two cross bars. It is constructed of 2" x 1//4" cold rolled flat bar. We started with the outside rectangle sitting on the floor of my shipping container workshop.

Next, we added the cross bars. The cross bars will prevent the side bars from flexing under the weight of the pots and provide additional hook space for pots.

Then we added little flats at the corners for the lifting eyes to which the chains would attach.

After some grinding (a lot of grinding) and a trip to the hardware store for some chain and carabiners we carried it into the house and hung it up in the kitchen to see how it looked.

It seemed to be in the right place and worked well with the Ikea adjustable hanging lights.

The next thing we needed to figure out was what we were going to use as hooks. I looked at a bunch of pictures of pot racks and searched for hooks that would work with ours but didn’t find what I was looking for. We decided to make our own hooks.

I modeled the tool and jig on one that we use to bend loops in the 9 gauge high tension galvanized fence wire that we use to support the mainline of our maple syrup connection system.

The hole goes over the big pin and drags the wire around forming it into the loop.

This is what we came up with.

The 1/4" rod we’re cold forming into the hooks is inserted as shown. The threaded rod clamp holds it in place while the initial curve is formed on the end.

We then slide the rod down, reclamp it, and bend the second bend, closing the loop.

Finally, we move the tool down to the end post and bend the hook. They look like this when the bending is done.

We used two bottles of gun bluing to turn everything black, rubbed everything with a mix of mineral oil and bees wax, hung it back up in the kitchen, and installed the hooks and bent them closed.

My wife was quick to add pots. Now the only problem is that I bang my head on the pots when I’m using the butcher block the pot rack hangs over. I’ve figured out which pots I can hang on the side that I work on and that if I hang them so that they hang away from me I can work under it with very little pot/head interaction.

Up next…replacing the round maple legs under the 850 lb maple butcher block with a matching welded steel frame.