Garden Ornament With Rainbow Glass

A had this large piece of oak. It is 1.6 metres high, 35cm wide and 10 cm thick. It weighs 22 kilos. I added some rainbow coloured glass to make a large garden ornament. I wanted the glass to be as visible as possible and to catch the sun from all directions so I cut holes that opened out like a funnel on one side and mounted the glass near the opening on the other side. You can see the idea in the drawing.

As well as a large piece of hardwood - as described above, you will need:

Five small sheets of 3mm glass in different primary colours.

About 1 metre of lead for stained glass (called 'came') 6mm wide.

Solder, tallow, and glazier's cement.

Waterproof glue.

Grate-black and linseed oil.

Tools:

The special tools I used were:

A curved gouge.

A 100cm Forstner drill bit.

An oil-filled glass cutter.

I started by marking out where to put the glass to make the most of the natural pattern (and cracks) in the wood. Then I cut the holes. Cutting through 10cm of solid oak is not easy. I had to start by drilling four or five 2.5 cm holes all the way through. Then I used the 10cm Forstner drill bit. I had two problems with that. Firstly, with a large Forstner bit it is difficult to keep the drill in one place. It tends to dig in on one edge and then skate across the wood leaving and ugly gouge in the wood. To stop that I found a bit of 18mm ply and cut a hole in it on my pillar drill using the 10cm Forstner. Then I clamped that to the wood where I wanted the hole to be. Secondly my battery powered drill did not have the power to turn the big drill bit. I had to buy a plug-in drill that had much more power - and didn't cost very much. I only drilled about 1.5 cm into the work with the Forstner. Then I turned the work over and used my curved gouge and a mallet to open up the hole on the other side. That took me a couple of hours to do each of the five holes. The result was five holes that match my diagram in the introduction.

The holes are 10cm in diameter. The came (lead) is 6mm wide and the glass fits into a 2mm slot on one side. So I cut the glass circles with 9.2cm diameter so that when I added the lead around it the result was 10cm diameter and would just fit into the holes. The easiest way to cut glass to a given diameter is just to draw the required circle on a piece pf paper, put the glass on top and follow the line with the glass cutter. I cut the lead, fitted it around the glass and soldered the ends together and finally used glazier's cement between the lead and the glass - in the usual way for stained glass (i don't want to go into the details of making the stained glass because there are other instructables that cover that better than i can). The lead is soft and has flanges each side (it's cross-section is like a letter 'H') so if it doesn't quite fit to is easy to just squash the lead and jam it in.

Once the glass was pushed into place I added waterproof wood glue on both sides between the lead and the wood. When the wood dried the glue was very obvious because it was much lighter than the wood or the lead. I mixed some grate-black (graphite and oil) with extra linseed oil to make a paint and painted over the glue so it blended in with the lead.

This has to live out-doors in the English weather so I didn't bother doing too much sanding - just removed a few obvious marks. Then I added several coats of linseed oil to try to protect it from the elements.