Hey, everyone!
I’m excited to finally share this project now that Christmas is over. My husband loves baseball and has grown a pretty serious collection of hats over the years. We have a small apartment and haven’t found the best way to store them. Enter: the Christmas present I made him this year!
This is a series of three hat racks designed to display his hats. Each board is 4’ long and holds five hats (he has a big head 
) As cool as it was just to have a place to put the hats, the projected needed a little more flair.
Using a 60-degree v-bit and Easel Pro, I carved the logos from each team into the wood so they would all have a designated place to hang. Since each board was 4’ long (48") and I was using a 750mm X-Carve, I had to carve each board in two carves. Talk about a nightmare to line that up! It’s not easy carving something on the machine that’s bigger than your workspace, so I had to do a bit of mind-hacking to figure it out.
First, I measured where I wanted each logo to go and marked it with a small dot on the wood. In Easel, I lined each series of logos up along the y-axis (y = 0) and centered the first logo on the 0,0 home position in Easel. The rest of the logos were spaced out along the y-axis from the 0,0 point as far as the corresponding pencil marks were on my board (9" apart, I think?). I had to flip all the logos 90 degrees counter-clockwise to make sure they would carve correctly along the y-axis, not the x-axis.
When I started the carve, I zero’d my X-Carve on the first dot on the board and carved two or three of the logos in sequence. After those logos carved, I slid the board down, re-zero’d the machine on the next dot, adjusted my Easel file (masking the logos I didn’t need and making sure I was carving the next ones in the sequence), and started the carve again.
Suffice to say, it was really tricky to do and that made me even more proud when it worked (after I messed up an entire board 
). Here’s the super-janky file if you’re interested in seeing it.
I should also mention that I used a drill press to add the holes. It was quicker for me to do this. You could totally use the X-Carve, though! The dowels are each 1/2" wide and stick out about 1.25" from the wood.
My husband is a self-proclaimed perfectionist so having a corresponding logo above each of his hats really made him happy. As for me, I was happy to see how beautifully a 60-degree v-bit worked in this wood (I usually stick with 90-degree bits).
All the hats are alphabetized from A-Z…which is actually a terrible idea because he’s bound to add new hats someday. If I had to do it over, I would sort the hats by American League or National League so new ones could be added.
He also has a baseball hat from a minor league team, the Myrtle Beach Pelicans. His college baseball team played in Myrtle Beach for Spring Break every year and I guess he became a fan. Look at how great the pelican logo looks:
The hats are now safely hung in our bedroom. And, like any good wife, I made him hang up his own gift 
