My wife had been muttering for a while about the fans we have in our bedrooms not being sufficiently high to be effective. And to be fair she was right. She’d balanced them on some cardboard boxes, but they weren’t that steady.
And then I came across some scraps of oak-faced ply in the workshop, and an idea was born…
Starting with a hexagon (for a bit of a bee theme), some careful cutting with the table saw to get the 60° angles on the edges of the ply and the 120° angles on the base and top, I made these.
After cutting the six sides I made a 120° cut along the length of some scraps of softwood to support the joins and then glued the sides together in pairs, then glued the pairs together. The top is supported on square pieces of softwood glued to the sides. The base is actually made from 12mm MDF and fits inside where it can’t be seen, but the thickness makes it easy to glue in and provides a bit of weight for stability.
After that I got a bit cocky 😀 I didn’t have any scraps left to make an octagonal prism for my son’s fan, but I could manage a nine-sided (nonagonal?) prism (each of the nine sides being narrower than they’d have needed to be for the octagonal version). The angles even work out quite conveniently too. Imagining the top as nine identical triangles fitting “pointy ends” together gives the size of the angle there as 40°, so the other two corners must be (180-40)/2 = 70° and the angle for the internal supports and internal corners of the top and base is 140°.
