Plant Holder

Materials:
5mm brass tubing
4mm nut wood dowels
Flux
Solder

I’ve wanted to experiment with brazing and brass tubes for quite some time and finally got to finish this nice little project, which was needed as I didn’t have any plants in my small room.

The Creation

The connections are made from 5mm brass tubing cut to length with a tube cutter. The length of the tubes varies according to the way they connect with the other tubes, so the distance from the center of the top opening of the vertical piece to the ends of each piece is equal. The wood is 4mm nutwood which when sanded a little fits perfectly into the tubes.

To proper fit the tubes to each other before brazing and to have more surface area for the weld, I saddle cut each of the horizontal pieces to fit onto the vertical tube.
This was done using my Dremel and a ~6mm grinding stone. For the angled pieces I made a special 3D-printed attachment to get the angle to precisely 45 degrees.

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Getting the angles right was still my biggest hurdle when trying to hold it all togehter for the brazing. Getting the pieces to stay connected while both heating them with the torch and applying the solder was quite a pain.

Luckily, it seems I had a little leeway in how precise the angles had to be due to the flexibility of the wood.

One of the most important things I learned was to control the heat and not blow the torch directly on the solder, which would then just melt away. I used very thin solder which evaporated quickly if it was hit by the flame. Before each braze I added flux to the connection which really helped getting the solder to spread out evenly.

The design went through a small iteration, dropping the cantilevers for the horisontal pins after I deemed them not necessary and the design sleeker without. I might have to upgrade the bottom half to the new design later although I think I would increase the material dimensions a little if I had to make a new.

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