A
treen stand I made for my tavern churchwarden…
Find a straight piece of dried tree branch about 2” in diameter. I used maple because it's everywhere, and I left the bark on mine.
Cut to about a 10” length; sand the ends smooth. Cut off the bottom 1/3 of the branch along its length. In other words, you’re giving a round branch a D-shaped cross section / a flat bottom
so it will lie flat on a table. After that, if you have a belt sander it’s time to use it. I don’t.
Now you need to make the bell-shaped scoop for the bowl to fit into. An inch or so from one end of the branch, cut across the shoulder of the branch, simultaneously parallel to both the end of the branch and the flat bottom. The finer-toothed saw the better. I happened to have an Xacto razor saw intended for plastic; it was perfect. Cut into the branch about the same depth you’ve seen on factory pipe stands; about 3/8” or so I guess.
Start digging out the scoop with the drum sander bit on the Dremel MotoTool. Going slowly and checking your progress frequently by test-fitting the pipe bowl into the scoop is the best idea you’ve had all day. When you’re satisfied, it’s time to make the stem support.
The stem support is the straightest twig you can find about the diameter of a pencil, about a foot long with a Y-fork in it. Cut the 2 sides of the fork to the length that looks right to you to keep the stem from flopping off the support.
Here comes the tricky part: eyeball how high up your “slingshot” needs to be
and how far back from the scoop it needs to be
to have the pipe sit sensibly in the frame. >>Cut the handle of the slingshot about 2” longer than that.<<
Find the spot where the Y-support is going to go into the base. Mark it with a pencil. Drill into the base with the right size drill bit – but not all the way through. Dry fit everything, figure out how much shorter your slingshot handle needs to be, cut it to length, dry fit again.
When everything’s OK, glue the slingshot to the base with carpenter’s glue, Elmer’s glue, etc. Don’t put too much glue in the hole or there will be a globcollar (hi KevLa) of glue showing. Just enough glue to keep the thing from falling apart.
5 will get you 10 that the finished stand is tipsywobbly. Glue tiny shims of the thin broken tree bark that is by now all over the place, index card stock, or whatever, to the bottom where needed.
With only hand tools other than the Dremel, the build takes about 2 hours.
Typing a description of the build takes about a half-hour.

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"treen"wood + en = wooden
tree + en = treen (pronounced tree -en)