Handmade Padauk Tea Lite Candle Holder

This was a Christmas gift project that I made at the end of 2017. I first saw the idea and plans on finewoodworking.com. I purchased a slab of Padauk from Wood Werks Supply in Columbus, OH for the project. The grain and color were beautiful. I couldn't wait to get started on the project. I had never worked with padauk before. I was in for a (dusty) surprise.

The piece I bought was 10 quarter, with a bit of a rough-sawn patch on one side. It was 30 inches long and about 5 inches wide. The first order of business was to rip it down into two 2x2" sticks. I would eventually get 4 complete candle holders out of this board.

This was the first sign of the mess to come. There was orange sawdust everywhere. My normally reliable dust collection just wasn't getting the job done. This was a problem I would fight with through the entire project.

I used my Incra Miter1000 to trim the 2x2 sticks down to length. For each candle holder, I cut 1 piece 3 inches long, 4 pieces 2.5 inches long, and 4 pieces 2 inches long.

The next step was drilling out the 1.5 inch diameter holes in the end of all 36 pieces. I built a simple jig out of scrap 2x4 and clamped it to the drill press fence. I used one of the off-cuts from the previous step to get my jig properly aligned to center the hole in each piece. Even with the shop vac hose positioned next to the work piece, I still made a colossal mess. Eventually I got through all the pieces.

The pieces were glued up in sets of three at first. I was worried about having alignment problems if I tried to do all 9 at once.

After the single rows were glued and dried, I sanded each down on my Ridgid Oscillating Spindle Sander. This got the job done, but made another HUGE mess of padauk dust.

Final glue-up was next, and I was getting close to the finish line.

After some final sanding and 2 coats of clear Shellac, the project was done.