Bottle Flower

My wife saw a flower like this one day and took a picture and asked if I could make one. Well I made  four. They are made from blue and green wine bottles and rebar. I first made the hub with 8  5/16" rods sticking out of it. Then I had to get corks and drill them to fit the rods. I acquired a cork installing tool, but it did not like a cork with a hole in it and collapsed them. So I made a short 5/16" piece of steel with a threaded hole in it. I put that in the cork when installing it and the put a screw in it to extract it.. I bent up some 1/2" rebar for the shape of the stem and welded on a piece with some 5/16" rod on the end for a green bottle for the leaf. The stem is screwed into the hub and there is a piece of yellow stained glass to cover the bolt. The 8 holes in the hub were spotted on my indexer in the wood lathe and then finished in the drill press .

The flower is 27" in diameter and it stand 57" out of the ground and about 15" goes in the ground  ( in a pipe ). It is quite heavy and needs lots of support.


Cheers, Jim

ps. That is what I like about this site...it is for all kinds of projects, not just wood.