Santa's Workshop 2009 - Spiral Candle Holder

The last gift I made for Christmas, 2009 (with a lot of help from my youngest daughter) is this spiral candle holder. It contains 24 small candle holes (1/2") and one regular candle hole (7/8").

I actually designed the spiral a year ago but didn't get around to finishing it until this year. Drawing a large spiral is not as easy as it may appear at first. I laid out a large piece of paper on the floor to start with. Next, I took a regular sized vegetable can (# 10?) and tied a long string around it with a pencil tied at the end. Using the can as the fulcrum, I drew a line on the paper while wrapping the string around the can, giving me one spiral-shaped line. I then moved the can over a bit (an inch or two) and repeated the process, giving me two roughly parallel spiral lines. This took a bit of experimenting so YMMV.

I cut out the spiral and traced it onto a sheet of half inch plywood. I then cut out the spiral with my jig saw. I smoothed the edges up, too, since this template can be used many times. I eyeballed where cuts should be to break up the spiral and cut them on the chop saw. So at this point, I had four curved pieces that when butted together formed a spiral.

Next, we laid out the ply wood pieces on a nice piece of clear 3/4"x5" poplar, traced the shapes, and cut the poplar into shorter pieces on the chopsaw. We used the scroll saw to cut out the individual blanks. Lots of sanding a smoothing ensued at this point to make the sides nice and soft.

Again, we eyeballed where the candle holders should go by laying them out on the spiral and getting what looked like the right layout. Then we traced each candle holder in place to make drilling the holes easier. I decided to finish the pieces with urethane before drilling so that I wouldn't have to worry about drips of glue getting in the holes and distorting their size. We finished all four sides, of course.

Drilling was pretty straight forward for my assistant as was inserting the candle ferrules. The big one fit nice an snug but the little ones each needed a drop of 5-minute epoxy to hold them in place.

This gift was a big hit and now we have a template to use to make many, many more if we want.