The piece on the right is made from the same tulip poplar tree that was used to make the Candle Pedestals below. At the top of this "lighthouse", the so-called light room, is an antique glass insulator. This one is a very common type know as the Hemingray No. 17. There are many types of glass insulators like this one that were very widely used to string power lines and telephone lines on power poles. You can read all about these insulators on several Websites listed below. I think they are most thought of as living on poles along train lines for train communication.

The LED lighting is powered by a battery pack under the bottom. The lighting slide switch has three positions, (1) OFF, (2) TIMED: 6 hours on 18 hours off, and (3) ON all the time. This is very similar to the lighting on the Candle Lighthouses previously described below.

Information on Hemengray insulators

National Insulator Association

Insulator clubs in the USA

And oh yes I should mention the little brass railing around the light room at the top. I've been trying to make one of these for quite some time. It's soldered together out of soft yellow brass wire (14 Gauge) using a few special tools. This is the first time that it looks half decent. If possible, I'll be putting these railings on most of my lighthouses from now on.

A Little About the Making

After turning the basic shape and sanding, the next thing is to see how the insulator will fit on top. At this point I'm planning for the LED lighting and what that will look like. I decided to use the same battery pack and LEDs that I use on the Candle Lighthouses that are shown below. (No candles, of course.) I want to place the LEDs about where all the glass in smoothly rippling, which is the groove where the power line wire would normally go. There are no sharp edges around there.

One part of the construction requires that a hole be drilled all the way through the turned tower from top to bottom so the LED wires can be strung from the base to the insulator top. I used what is called a bell hanger bit, a three foot long shaft with one end made into a normal 3/8 inch drill for a few inches. It turns out that a bell hanger bit is not accurate enough to go through a foot of wood. The shank is just too inaccurate. (Bell hanger bits are used to drill holes inside a wall through the two-by-fours for stringing doorbell wire.) Next time I'll use a so-called aircraft drill. It's much more precise in the shank. It seems actually to be related to gun-drilling, the sort of thing that's used to drill long gun barrels.

Yes, there will be a next time. I'm planning two types of Insulator Lighthouses, one using the Hemingray No.17 and the other the smaller Hemingray No. 9. Would you like one? Let me know! I think they will be about $75.

These candle pedestals were made from fresh albeit dead Poplar, of the Tulip variety they tell me. The tree was planted in honor of the Advent Lutheran Church's first pastor, The Rev. Gary Berkland here in Morgan Hill, CA. He's still very much alive, but the poplar died anyway. So, the idea was to do something with the tree to properly retire it. Much of it is still sitting in my wood box so I'll have to think about what to do with all that, but these candle pedestals were requested by the people of the church to honor their first pastor. And so I made them. If you have a similar situation, let me know if I can help.

I got the idea for these from the Maltese Cross with its four lobes, and also from many church items I've seen over the years. But they also reminded me and my wife of something else. It took us a while, but these three things look rather like Lumiére of Beauty and the Beast!. So now I call these things the lumiére Brothers.

In this pic, I just wanted to show a little more detail about the wood. As you will see below (should you choose to keep reading, thank you) the poplar appears very white and without any grain detail, or of knots and other interesting flaws. My wife and I were disappointed in its lack of prettiness and wood look. So, could poplar be made to show like a rich featured wood such as redwood?

Normally I'd go to YouTube and get lots of amateur and possibly expert advice. And so I did. It was a jungle of do this, do that, use a sealer, stain with water based.... I chucked all that out and decided to do the very least possible. It's just wood, right? After the final turning on the lathe, I sanded in the standard way, starting with coarse 80 grit sandpaper and going all the way to 800 grit for the final sanding. That produced a very fine and smooth surface, although far from shinny. It was still like white paper, to which it is obviously closely related.

I simply went and got some regular Minwax Polyurethane of the high gloss variety, and voila! It took a full four coats to get the finish you see. After that the natural grain showed through, and even better, the different coloration of the wood as it goes from knots to heartwood to sapwood showed really nicely.

It was a beautiful tree when in bloom and green. Life in a churchyard must be risky for plants. Over the years, the church folks have told me about waning trees so that we might bring some sort of life back to it. And there seems now to be an olive tree getting dead branches.

Anyway, the pic here shows some logs from the poplar tree just like the ones I used. The first thing I do is cut the ends to get fresh and parallel surfaces for insertion into the lathe.

After a lot of learning, trying and some cursing, I finally got something to come out as I mostly intended. I'm both learning to use the lathe in new ways and trying to produce something of greater than zero value.

In this view I've still not attained the sweeping curvature I really wanted. So, these two on the right seem a little wonky. Eventually I realized the best curve would be a section of ellipse. Using CAD software I plotted out the exact ellipse for each of the three curves I needed, and made templates to hold up to the workpiece to check my work. Long story short, it eventually got done. The people seemed to like them and that's all that matters.

If you have any comments or questions, Email Me

This new design on the right is a tea light or votive type candle holder atop a tower resembling a lighthouse. The lighthouse tower is internally lit with LEDs which illuminate the window, door, and the "observation level" at the top. In this picture there is a lit candle in the glass holder where the "light room" at the very top would be on a real lighthouse. I made a dozen or so of these using California redwood, mostly the red heartwood, but the models on display here were made with redwood heartwood with streaks of much lighter sapwood.

I call it Candle LightHouse. It stands just under 16 inches tall (40 cm) on a base of 6 inches diameter (7.6 cm). The LED lighting comes with battery pack which includes a timer that can, if desired, turn on the lights for same 6 hours each day (all explained in a manual).

Other Versions

This one was made in August 2024 from California redwood. There is both the red heartwood and the lighter sapwood for accent. This piece is intended as a votive or vigil candle, but it also looks good on the mantel in any case.

The glass candle holder is maroon with an inside diameter of about 2-1/4 in, (57 mm). It's about that deep too, inside.

With Door and Two Windows

I added a door and two windows to the design above, all lit by internal LEDs. The battery pack is hidden in the base along with batteries. Most useful is the feature that allows the LEDs to automatically be on for the same 6 hours each day that you choose.