Pallet Xmas Tree

So this is my first attempt at an ible after lots of reading and doing of some little projects so please be kind! As with most people I''ve taken some great ideas off here and tweaked them for my own circumstance and after seeing a few pallet xmas trees on here I'd thought I'd give it a go and see where I ended up..

Tools used

Chop saw

Cordless drill and driver

Sanding belt

a few screws a bit of old copper pipe and some pallet off cuts

Every good tree needs a log at the base so I took a log from an earlier tree pruning and squared off the ends best I could

So from some Pallet cross pieces and roughly cut them into 18" lengths, made a rough mitre joint and screwed them together when square to secure..

Whilst upside down I centrally located the log and marked for holes so I could screw through the base into the log. I counter sunk these holes then screwed through with 5" screws into the log to secure it

Once the base was secure I turned it over and drilled a centre hole to accept the piece of 16mm copper piping I was using to put the branches on

After a few false starts trying to be clever I found using the flat edge to the rear of my workbench was best, so I slowly scoured the workshop for scrap pieces and assembled them in an ever decreasing (or increasing) fashion.. I squared each piece on the chop saw and sanded lightly..

So I had to find the middle of both length and width so I could drill a hole for these to stack on top of each other on the brass pipe. Easiest way was to do a line from corner to corner and hey presto you have middle or near as damn it.. wasn't being too pedantic over accuracy

So with pipe fixed securely in the base ( hit into countersunk hole) I started placing my pieces of wood no all sanded with holes in the middle.. first of all as you can see I was placing them kind of randomly ..then as you will see in the last pic....

.. I realised if you just slightly offset them and continues all the way up you got a double helix type effect... and as you can see from the title picture it looks nice with a few tea lights on...

Oh well that's my first 'ible over hope it was ok for you all and thanks for reading..