My Large North Pole

I'm sure some of you have seen the North Poles I've made and sold, my last post was about making a few more. Well I got a crazy idea, which is quite a regular occurrence around here, to make a large one.

 

So the idea started two winters ago when, here in Prince Edward Island, we got a total of 18 FEET of snow. It was so high, it went over the top of our outdoor lamp post and bent it. It's behind here somewhere:

 

So we bought a new lamp post and when Eric was taking the old one apart, I asked told him to save the post because I had an idea.

It waited for a year-and-a-half for me to do something with it. (That's not so long, I have crib parts and doors that have been waiting for at least five years). So I took the post outside my shop and spray painted it white and then painted the red stripe and some green accents. Now, how to attach a ball on top, and a sign? The top of the post is threaded but I didn't use that.

 I found a piece of 2" x 4" lumber and drilled a hole through it that the top of the post would fit into.

 I painted that cross piece green and then cut out a smaller piece of wood to fit on top. I bought a huge gold sparkling plastic Christmas ornament to use as my ball on top of the post and it had a screwed on top, something like this:

 So I cut a hole in the wood and glued in the cap, upside down. This will allow me to screw the ball on top. I put a nail across the hanging loop to prevent the cap from coming out of the wood block, should the glue fail.

The next photos show the Top of wood piece, bottom of wood piece, and piece attached with screws to 2" x 4"

    

Then I painted a North Pole sign and attached it to the front edge of the 2" x 4" and screwed in the gold ball.

 

Once that was done, I screwed down a piece of plywood to the tree stump in the front yard of my shop. I used lag screws to attach the lamp post to the plywood.

And we just got our first snowfall!