How to Make Your Own Wine Cork Board With Wood Glue

Champagne corks are not uniformly shaped enough for a cork board.

Whether you are a wine snob or just someone who buys the three bottles of red wine for $10 special at the local drug store to make sangria, a cork board doesn’t take a lot of effort to make. It serves two purposes. The first purpose is simple utility. The second purpose is as a showpiece so you can point to a specific cork and explain how you came across this particular Chilean red. Either way, obtaining the corks is the most time-consuming part.

Things You'll Need

• Wine corks
• Wood glue
• Bag of assorted rubber bands
• Kitchen twine
• Wood for the frame and backing
• Wood stain
• Finishing nails or smaller
• Razor blade knife
• Wall mount for hanging

Instructions

1. Collect at least 200 wine corks. Save your the wine corks or ask a local barkeep or a bar/restaurant owner to save corks for you. Two hundred corks works for an 18-by-18-inch cork board. That’s 11 corks end-to-end for a vertical edge and 21 corks side-by-side for a horizontal edge. Typical length for a wine cork is approximately between 1 1/3 and 1 3/4 inches.

2. Build the frame by cutting a piece of pine into four equally sized sections. This dictates how big the cork board will be. Cut the ends of the four pieces in a diagonal fashion so the pieces fit together as a square frame. Stain the frame wood. Make sure the wood for the frame is no wider than a wine cork so the depth of the eventual frame is about 5/8 to 3/4 of an inch. Nail or glue the frame together. Cut a piece of balsa wood to fit the back of the frame. Attach the backing to the frame with glue or smaller nails.

3. Insert the loose corks into the frame. Use a razor knife to shave off some of the corks to get the perfect fit. The corks can be placed end to end or side by side, however, most wine cork boards are cross-hatched with a few vertical corks are alongside a few horizontal ones. Whatever the case, all corks have logos so make sure it faces outward. For example, if the name or mascot of the winery is a frog, then the cork will have a picture of a frog on it.

4. Glue the corks together for maximum strength. Put a dab of wood glue about the size of a dime on the end of one cork and press it to the end of another cork. Secure the corks snugly with a rubber band or kitchen twine. For horizontal corks, put a thin strip of glue along the length of every other cork and put four corks together. Secure them with twine or a rubber band. Let them sit for at least 12 hours to a day for the glue to dry. Remove the rubber bands or twine.

5. Put thin strips of glue on the edges and lay the corks into the frame along the edges first. Then put strips of glue for the rest of the corks, Place corks working inward toward the center. This works because you have already arranged the corks before they were glued together. Let the newly constructed cork board sit for a day so the glue can dry.

6. Attach the wall mount with glue and small nails. Hang the cork board on the wall.

Tips & Warnings

• Wood glue won't work with synthetic wine corks.

• If your order wine in a restaurant, remember to ask the waiter for the cork.

References

• Wine Intro: Cork Boards