Reclaimed Wood Coat Rack using Tinker toys

Before I begin this post, I have to sincerely thank Gail for asking me to be a guest blogger.  Like Gail, I love taking old things and repurposing them into something new. If you’re like me, you like creating but you don’t want to spend a lot of money.  Since I had all the paints and glues for this reclaimed wood coat rack project, the total cost was FREE.  

A few months ago I shared  4 other pallet wood fish, but when my sister asked me if I could make her some, I knew I wanted to take it another step further.  For one thing, I needed fins…fins on top, fins on the bottom and fins in between.  When I showed you my pallet wood fish  back in March, I had a couple of comments that they would also make great hooks.  So hooks and fins it is!

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Hopefully you have a stash of pallet wood, for this project you’re going to need the wider planks (around 5 inches).  Cut your planks into fish size, about 21 inches, more or less.  Draw a fish shape directly on the pallet wood and use a jigsaw or scroll saw to cut out the pattern.

Sand the pallet wood really well to get it ready for painting.

Start painting.  You really can’t go wrong.   Any resemblance to real fish, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Seriously, you can’t mess this up.

Just use any brightly colored acrylic paint or chalk paint to paint your colorful designs.

Finished off the edges with a dark stain on the sides and a clear wax on top of the fish.

To make a side fin, take a weathered stick and saw off a corner.  Round off the corners with a scroll saw or sander.  If you get this technique down, then you are all set to make my driftwood tree…just do that another 100 times.

I used gorilla glue to glue the side fins into place.  You’ll see later that they were painted to match their respective fishies.

To give you some paint ideas, here are 10 of my painted fish. Some have the branch side fin, some have painted side fins and some have none.

Cut a board for your fish to be mounted on, this board was a 2″x 10″ and about 2 inches longer than my fish.  Before attaching your Tinker Toys or fish, finish the board in your choice of finishes, this one was sanded, stained and waxed.

Now for the Tinker Toy part of the project.  I knew I wanted to turn a couple of these guys into coat hangers, but before going out to buy new hooks, I had to see if I had anything at home I could use. The Tinker Toys had made themselves at home under the steps where I had kept some of the kids old toys.  They had never really played with the Tinker Toys, they were Lego kids all the way, so I’m sure they wouldn’t mind turning a few into coat hooks.

Now my husband was another story…he said, “as a kid, I never really got into Legos, I loved playing with Tinker Toys”.  Uhhhhh, honey, Legos were after your time, they didn’t have Legos when you were a kid.

I used builders adhesive (Liquid Nails) to attach the fishy to the backboard and gorilla glue to attach the tinker toys.

The Tinker Toys as is, would probably only be used for light duty.  If you need something to stand up to daily, heavy duty use, like towels, you may want to swap the wooden stick out for a iron rod. Of course, paint the iron rod the color of Tinker Toys.

For this guy, I gave him a shelf, screwed into the top.

And this guy was shelfless, it really is up to you.

The fish would be a great group project for kids, everybody could decorate their own fish.

Joan

see more of Joan’s projects here