Broom Shaft and MDF Tall Plant Stand El Cheapo!

In this Instructable I will show you how I make a very inexpensive Plant stand.

My Sister tasked me with making a pair of these stands at 36 inches in height as she couldn't find any suitable stands online, they need to be 36 inches in height so the plants can get some light from the 2 front windows in her apartment.

What gave me the idea for this particular style was seeing some plant stands at a show with copper tubing for the 4 uprights, copper tube is expensive and dowel up to 18/20mm was equally expensive as well, so I went down to the local hardware diy store and saw the broom shafts, these were 23mm in diameter, I checked for straightness etc, perfect, and only £2.50 each or $3.44 I have some surplus 15mm MDF so we are good to go.

I will be using a Table saw to cut the MDF plus a CNC machine to create holes in the MDF and as such I will be wearing the appropriate PPE throughout the cutting operation, This will Include Eye and Ear protection and a Dust Mask.

On with the build.

8 Brush/Broom Shafts

15mm MDF

Wood Glue

Palm sander

Wood primer

White spray gloss

Router

CNC Machine

6mm Router bit.

The Broom shafts were slightly longer than 36" so I marked these up and cut to the correct length, and lightly sanded the ends.

I had a piece of 15 MDF at approx 100cm and the width was 258mm which is ideal, so I set the table saw up at 258mm and cut the MDF, I managed to get 4 Pieces out of this, enough for 2 stands.

I thought I would Router the edges on what would be the tops side for a more professional finish, this I did and sanded the edges, these turned out really well.

I set the CNC machine up, the MDF is placed routed side down on the spoil board and clamped in position in 2 places.

Creating a Toolpath for the holes for the uprights:

The CNC machine does a far better job at creating the holes than I could ever do using hole saws or forstner bits so a sketch is needed to carry out this process.

I'm using a trial edition of Vetric VCarve pro for this, we do the set up first, Inputting the dimensions of the MDF which in this case is 258mm x 258mm x 16mm and the zero will be bottom left corner of the mdf.

We can now select the centre circle and create the first circle at 23.1mm the Broom shafts are approx 23mm I will need to sand to get a snug fit.

I make this circle 25mm up from the bottom and 25mm in from the left side and click ok, I then create an horizontal line across the centre and a vertical line, I will be using these lines to mirror the circles, click on the mirror tab, Highlight the circle and click create mirrored copy on the vertical tab, Then select both those circles and select mirrored copy Horizontally, we now have 4 circles, we can now create some holes.

Creating the toolpath.

We select the pocket Tab:

The bit I'm going to be using is a 6mm flat end and the depth will be 16.2 mm as the mdf measures 16mm and I want to cut all the way through.

Then its just a case of calculate, preview and rename and save the file.

The MDF is placed on the spoil board and clamped in a couple of places, and set the program off and we have 4 perfect holes.

When all 4 are done, a quick trial to see if every thing fits together ok, and it does.

Painting the MDF boards:

There are various videos and Instructions on how to paint edges on MDF online.

Some say don't sand first just apply a coat of Acrylic primer with a roller to the edges then leave to dry then sand, I already sanded before seeing this unfortunately :( but after a couple of coats of spray primer and sanding I was starting to get a result, with me there is always a tendency to rush this type of thing.

If age and experience can tell you one thing, its to slow down, let things dry properly and adhere to what instructions say, like stirring paint before use, I was one for just shaking the tin, It seldom works, its like applying varnish and it never dries, it needs to be stirred for the additives to work.

The majority of videos on Youtube are sped up, Life doesn't need to be like that and the results will be so much better if we take our time.

With a couple of coats of Matt white, It was time to assemble the stands, this was just a case of fitting the 4 poles into the base first after applying wood glue, and then tapping the top tier down until the domed tops of the broom shafts just protruded through top.

The last thing to do was to glue and tap the top tier into position, with the domed heads of the broom shafts just protruding through it looks pretty cool.

Leaving the Broom shafts unpainted looks great, these were just given a quick rub with Boiled Linseed Oil to finish the stand off.

All in all, a nice little project, and of course it doesn't have to be MDF, I used it because I had it, but pallet wood or Pine anything would work, and you could use anything for the uprights, polished copper pipe looks amazing but then you have it to clean? Maybe not:(

Hope you enjoyed this Instructable and thanks for looking.