(Costs less than $20 w/o flag!)
Are your Cub Scouts saying the Pledge of Allegiance to someone’s shoulder?
Don’t they deserve a proper flag with a proper stand?
Do you want them to finish achievement five in the Wolf book?
Here is what we came up with….
First we build a base:
Start with an 8 foot 1x6 pine board. I bought this at Home Depot for $8
Cut this board into two 28 inch long pieces and six 5 ½ inch pieces.
These pieces are then assembled with glue, nails and screws as shown in the next two pictures.
This is the lower portion of the base
This is the upper portion of the base
The lower and upper portions of the base are attached at their centers to make a base.
Some hints and tips:
- This can be cut out by hand if someone is good with a hand saw.
- The "feet", or the 5 ½ inch square pieces line up easily.
- The "feet can be assembled with either nails or screws.
- If you use screws, drill pilot holes as the pine boards really like to split.
- The whole thing can also be made with ¾ inch plywood.
- If you assemble the base upside down, there will not be any nails or screws visible from the top.
- Making centerlines on the boards ensures that everything is lined up correctly.
Next we make the Pole Holder portion;
The pole holder is made out of ¾ inch plywood. I have used pine and it works, but the small pieces are prone to splitting which really frustrates the kids.
Each section is composed of two pieces that are stacked. (There are total of 6 pieces for the pole holder.)
The top is 2 ½ inches square
The middle is 4 inches square
The bottom is 5 ½ inches square
In order to hold the flagpole, I drilled a 1 3/8 inch hole into the pole holder pieces. I used a Fostner bit, but a spade bit will also work.
Find the centers of all the pieces that have been cut by drawing lines from corner to corner.
Note: It is important to have the lines pointing this way for alignment purposes.
CAUTION: This should only be done by an adult!
The small pieces will catch on the drill and snatch a young person’s hand.
In order to center the piece correctly, look down the lines and make sure the point of the drill lines up with both lines.
CAUTION: This should only be done by an adult!
The small pieces will catch on the drill and snatch a young person’s hand.
CLAMP PIECES IN THE DRILL PRESS FOR SAFETY!
The end result can be assembled to look like this.
Once completed, a little paint can really make this something the scouts can be proud of.
We painted ours Blue and Gold!
Next we make the flag pole:
The pole is a 1 inch wood closet rod. This was purchased at Home Depot for $1.05 per foot, or around $8.
The pole needs to be cut to height. While putting it into and taking it out of the stand we hit our 8 foot ceiling in our meeting room. We cut the pole down to compensate.
You can paint or stain your flagpole. We have kept ours natural.
There are a lot of possibilities. The walking stick plaques for each Cub Scout rank can be attached as the Den progresses. The pole can then be given to the Den leader upon completion of Webelos 2, for example.
We need to attach the Flag:
Since I am handy with knots, I made two three strand Turks head knots to use as attachment points for the flag.
The nice thing about a Turks head
Is that is a good friction knot. You
Can slide them up and down the pole
As needed to keep your flag looking
good. These are slid together to show
that one of the clips is pointing up and
the other one down.
If you make a Turks head it becomes
clear how this was done.
This is a close-up of how
I attached the clips.
They are mini Bowline knots!
If you want to make a Turks head yourself, check out this website.
http://www.northnet.org/ropeworks/archive/turkhed.html
This is probably the easiest to follow explanation of how to make these.
You could easily attach the flag by drilling a hole into the pole and putting a small piece of rope through it.
The bottom of the flag could be attached with a simple loop with a clip
We finished up the Turks head knots with clips to secure the flag easily.
Overall this was a great project and we have taken this flag stand to many places.
