Candle Pedestals a la Church
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.
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