Plaques for Peace Poles
Eventually, I will resume work on this page and on plaques I may make – probably they will be copper. I used to offer those here. But I’m overworked at present. However, here are a few thoughts about the pole that can be used with plaques.
Wooden Poles
This might be reaching too far for most people, but a really cool way to speak to the future about peace is this. For early settlers in this country the first choice for a fence post was Black Locust because that can last a hundred years (they were planning for their children and grandchildren). It still can be found in specialty lumber yards, but not usually in Home Depot or similar big box stores. Making the peace pole is a lot to think about, so it might make sense just to get a normal treated wooden 4 by 4 and let someone ten or fifteen years from now worry about Black Locust when it is time to move the plaques to new wood.
However, a cool thing to think about is planting a Black Locust tree for the people in the future to replace the wood. English ship builders, back in the sailing vessel days, after building a ship, would plant enough oak trees to build another identical ship when the ship they built needed to be replaced. That could be done with Black Locusts for peace poles. Every fifty years, cut one down and plant another.
Some senior class would return to their fiftieth reunion to see the Black Locust pole of theirs get replaced by the new senior class whose turn it was. That could go on forever. It’s just a thought.
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For whatever wood might be used for your peace pole, here is a thought about what to do with the top of it. You could cut a point into the top of your pole with a circular saw as I did in the photo below.
However, many like the handcrafted feel of a hand-carved top, something that can be done in twenty minutes with a kitchen knife. You can see my video about how to carve a point for the top with a knife at this link (hit their back button to return here). This 45 second video shows me doing it in 20 minutes with a $20 chef’s knife I still use in my kitchen. It did not hurt the knife because for the striker a wooden 2 by 2 instead of a hammer (a hammer wouldn’t have been good for the knife). I set the knife where I wanted to remove a chip of wood and then hit it with the striker so the blade always was going away from me.
This is something you can practice on the end of the pole that will be going underground. If that happens to turn out well, use that end for the top. But looking hand-carved can be a good thing no matter how it turns out.
A quicker version would be carving just two sides into a shed roof shape, like the one in the photo below. That piece I’ve been using for a doorstop in my shop for years. It now is the piece into which I screwed the one-word plaque shown higher on the page.
Whatever you do, do not buy a fence post cap and slap it on there. They just look wrong.
For information on how to plant your pole in the ground, click on this link: Planting