| Project by coloradoclimber | posted 250 days ago | 670 views | 12 times favorited | 8 comments |  |
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I made these after seeing RAH's Wine Balancers project. I had to make mine with slightly different dimensions to get them to stand. Once I found the size and angle that worked for me they are pretty stable. You can bump a table reasonably hard and they wont fall over. On a counter they stand there all day.
Mine ended up 9 3/4 inches longest end to end. The hole is 1 1/4 inch rounded over with a 1/4 router bit. The hole is 7 1/8 inch up from the longest side of the bottom bevel. The bottom bevel angle is 36 degrees.
The angle is different that what RAH posted. I couldn’t get a nice stable feel at 45 degrees. I ended up using 36 degrees after experimenting a bit. They stand a bit more vertical but seem more stable. It seems the angle is actually pretty forgiving because you can slide the bottle up and down the neck to get the center of mass where you need it to stand. I just had better luck at 36 degrees, at least with the wine bottles I had.
They work with full or empty bottles, or anything in between.
The woods are ambrosial maple and cherry, tung oil finish.
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8 comments so far
Colin
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114 posts in 363 days
posted 250 days ago
Now thats interesting, as I too tried to make wine balancers and mine wouldn’t stand very well either. I shall have a go at changing my angles, thanks for the advice.
-- Colin, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. "Every craftsman was once an amateur"
Grumpy
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4803 posts in 294 days
posted 250 days ago
Thanks for the information climber.
-- Grumpy - "Always look on the bright side of life"- Monty Python
TomK
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354 posts in 317 days
posted 248 days ago
My prototype, from MDF using RAH’s specs worked well. I was going to make a bunch out of hardwoods for Christmas presents, but other things got in the way. Maybe I should play around some more. Did you vary the hole position at all?
-- North Texas
coloradoclimber
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279 posts in 510 days
posted 248 days ago
Tom,
I did not intentionally play with the hole position. I started with a piece of 1×4 pine scrap from the big box. I cut the first test just likes RAH’s. I could get it to stand but it wasn’t as stable as I wanted. So I cut next test piece longer and tried different angles. So I guess I did play with the hole position a little bit, in that as I trimmed each new angle the hole got closer to the bottom. I did a google search on wine balancers and someone else recommended the 7 1/8 dimension. I tried that and by then I’d already figured out the 36 degrees was working for me. So I cut a prototype the dimensions above and that worked pretty well. I made the final pieces to that size and they all turned out pretty stable. Given that you can play with the neck position of the bottle in the balancer they seem to be reasonably forgiving.
Changing the angle does change the look, the lower angle stands a bit more vertical.
rikkor
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7112 posts in 317 days
posted 248 days ago
I did mine at 40 degrees. Works well with a full bottle, but it fades fast.
-- Maplewood, MN
mot
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posted 247 days ago
These are funny. I have a bunch of scrap and should make some for fun. Thanks for posting!
-- You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. (Plato)
coloradoclimber
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279 posts in 510 days
posted 247 days ago
I just took a closer look at RAHs and the ones I made. It looks like RAH puts his bottles in much closer to the end of the bottle and I shoved my bottles farther in up the neck. That probably explains why his works at a steeper angle than these. Different neck position gets the center of mass at a different distance horizontal from the balancer and should allow for a different angle. Looks like it’s pretty flexible.
MsDebbieP
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11555 posts in 603 days
posted 246 days ago
they would make nice box lids… then remove the lid to display the bottle… not sure what you’d do with the rest of the box though.
1” thick wood?
-- "Functional WoodArt" by Debbie, Canada (http://www.execulink.com/~yohan)