One of my favorite things to do during the holiday season is walk around and look at people’s home and yard decorations. I love seeing all of the inventive ideas people use to decorate, and here in relatively sunny Florida this is especially amusing since so many people decorate with snow-related items: snowflakes, snowmen, and just plain old fake snow. And then there are the trees. Some real, some artificial, but around these parts people are very into decorating both the trees in their yards and the ones standing in the windows.
But you may have a holiday tree standing right in your yard that you hadn’t even considered. Redditor s10blazed has posted his inventive tree creation, with 3D printed parts, made from an unused free-standing flag pole that is in the middle of his front yard.
s10blazed explains where the original idea to convert the flag pole into a tree came from:
“When we bought this house it had a flag pole in the front yard. I have no intention of flying a flag nor did I feel like digging it up. So its been there idle for over 4 years. But my wife loves decorating for Christmas and I jokingly said last year we should make it into a tree so it actually gets used. She took me way too seriously and had the idea stuck in her head all year. Whenever she gets a crazy idea like this, it means I get to decipher the crazy and make it a reality.”
And decipher his wife’s craziness is exactly what he did. s10blazed reasoned that he could perform a miraculous holiday feat, turning the flag pole into a Christmas tree using just five parts. If you look at the flag pole/tree, you can see that it is a rather minimalist design that s10blazed has come up with, but it still allows you to decorate it and, more importantly, light it up.
The tree’s body is made up of two halves, which provide places from which to hang wires. The body is clamped, glued, and uses a hole in the pole that keeps it all together. The flag pole also has a new 3D printed ball for the top of it, because the other one was outdated and way too large. This way, the pole that holds the star is not blocked, and there is no open end left exposed on the top of the flag pole. If you want a star for the top of your flag pole/ tree, this is something you will definitely have to consider.
The last few parts that s10blazed made are an adapter so that a PVC pipe can be “hose-clamped” parallel to the flag pole, and a solid rod was placed inside the PVC pipe so it can undergo force on the hose clamps without them getting crushed.
So there you have it. An ingenious conversion of a flag pole to a merry holiday yard decoration with five simple parts and much inventiveness. The tree has received almost 500 views, so don’t be surprised if you see some more of these around your neighborhoods this Holiday Season!
“I had fun making it and my wife has been on cloud 9 since we finished. All-in-all a good project,” concludes s10blazed.
Have you hacked your flag pole this year? Let us know in the 3D Printing a Flag Pole Christmas Tree forum on 3DPB.com.
