Peg Letter Rack

In the lobby of our house, we have a shelf where the mail gets dumped, we were sick of this and kept losing mail off the shelf so thought we should do something about it. My wife had the idea of using some pegs and building it ourselves.

The end product is functional, appealing and every time the mail goes in it, we know we made it..

Materials..

Pegs, lots of pegs...

PVA Glue

Paint or varnish.

Now, am not sure what these pegs universal name is, on the package, it says "wooden pegs", I know them as spring pegs, am sure others know them as other names.

First thing first, you need to separate the wooden peg parts from the spring..

Simply, Twist one leg of the peg in the opposite direction of the other leg, only one will probably be released by this, and watch your fingers those springs are quite strong and can nip you fingers.

Next pull the spring off, again, watch your fingers.

You should now have 2 wooden legs and a spring, keep the spring, you will end up with quite a lot of them, and am sure you'll find some inspiration and be able to make something out of them !

The process is quite simple.

Use a little PVA glue (contact adhesive) on the flat edge of a pair of peg legs.

Let the glue dry a little (tacky to touch), and press the legs together back to back the same way up. Hold them like this for a minute and set aside to cure fully.

Repeat this until you have 20 pairs.

You will also need 6 Unglued pairs

Now to build a base for the final part to stand on.

This needs to be done twice.

Take 2 single peg legs, glue one edge only on each peg so when pushed together you will see the spring grooves in the back do not line up.

Using 10 pairs and 2 single pegs, build a semi circle as shown in the picture.

Again, with the PVA, glue together the angles of the pegs the final singles go at the ends which should on completion be level.

Not all pegs are the same size, so I would suggest a dry run and add or remove pegs as necessary until you get a level edge on your last 2 pegs.

Build 2 of these sides, they will be the front and back

Using the base parts built in the previous step, again, with PVA glue, attach them on or near the outside edge, I found that the spring groove was a good datum point to use to ensure they were in the same place.

Make sure you glue them square.

To aid in this I used a carpenters square and elastic bands to hold it together while the glue cured.

Do this so you have 2 base pegs attached to either the front of the back.

Now you will need to attach the other front/back piece to the base pegs, this time you can't do one at a time, so use care to ensure alignment, and be liberal with the glue, I didn't wait for the glue to become tacky which gave me time to wiggle and move the pieces around for alignment. Again, I used elastic bands and a carpenters square to ensure vertical alignment.

Set the completed item aside for the glue to cure, in accordance with the manufactures recommendations.

We used a "tester" paint of a colour which matched the decor of where we were going to keep the letter rack. Using these match pots we have found to be great as they are cheap, sometimes free.

You could also varnish the end product if you wanted, however, if you were intending on varnishing I would suggest lightly sanding the pegs prior to the build.

hope you have found this helpful and insightful.