Stainless Steel Plaques for Peace Poles
Plaques normally are made of materials that last ten or fifteen years. I’m used to making peace poles that last for millennia. I’d like to make plaques that do too. Every ten or fifteen years they would be moved to a new wooden pole (although below I tell how to make that every 50 years).
However, the material that lasts forever is stainless steel, and that’s expensive. For the time being, I am offering them for about the same price as the plexiglass plaques made by others.
This is a new item for me that I am going to start selling for $12 per word. My customers often request a mix of the traditional phrases along with instances of the single word “Peace” in various languages in order to connect with as many people as possible. Single words will cost $12 each for now. The phrase in some languages, like Chinese, have three words because of the way I group their characters, so that’s $36. It varies from one language to another. I’m still working on that (November 2024).
For language choices, I’m just beginning to make these, so what you choose will be what I make next. See language choices here: Language Choices
But I have thought of a way for them to be even less expensive, at least for you. For me they will cost a lot but they will fulfill two purposes that motivate me to do this, at least for a while.
Crowd Source Plaques
I was a writer who made sculpture on the side until I discovered peace poles a couple of decades ago. There still are things I want to write about though. So, I want to learn self-publishing by publishing some simple short stories, like the thousand other people who post things on Amazon everyday where no one ever finds them. In order to arrange for someone to find mine, in the hope that Amazon will notice me eventually, and also to enable more long-lasting peace poles to get made, I am going to try giving plaques away. For each person who reads my story, I will give away one free plaque. Right now you can crowd source your plaques by having enough other people read my story for you to get all the plaques you need.
Amazon charges three dollars to let someone read a short story. You could call friends, colleagues, classmates, siblings, cousins, whomever, and tell them the deal. They read one story (a half hour read) and you get a plaque for free. The only thing the organizer of this would have to purchase is an eleven dollar 4 by 4 pole from someplace like Lowes or Home Depot.
Above is shown a single word plaque. Some people want just the word peace in two or three dozen languages. Others want the phrase “May peace prevail on earth,” which has five words, but I lump “on earth” together and count it as one, so the phrase requires only four plaques. Some phrases require only two. Others, like Chinese (Mandarin) require three (six single character words divided onto three plaques). So it varies by language.
I have made large stainless steel poles on which thirty languages were requested, but there was room for only twenty four as full phrases. So they chose twenty phrases and fifteen single words for peace. Just having the phrase in English once, and maybe in one other language, and all the rest as single words could be an option depending on how many languages you want to represent.
Installing the plaques
The plaques screw in with the stainless screws that come with the plaques. I’ll enclose the Phillips bit if you need it. Depending on how hard your wood is, it might be easier to drill a pilot hole first, but after that you just put a Phillips bit into a variable speed drill and drive them in.
Putting deck stain on your wood before attaching the plaques is a good idea. For these plaques, get a deck stain that darkens the wood. That will make these bright plaques stand out better.
The Pole
This next thought might be a little much to think about at this point in your project, but a really cool way to speak to the future 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
I am just developing this page and this concept (November 2024), so if you have any questions or thoughts, please give me a call: 513-348-4744