I have made progress on this today. I also put a decent cut into my finger on my left had using it as a chisel stop. Not something I did on purpose. It was purely accidental. But making this chandelier is not an accident. It is a prototype. I was intending to paint it black, but the piece of wood that came up was too pretty to do that. I may paint the arms, which are made from cherry wood. They may just get an oil finish. I think it would look good either way. I need to put an eyelet on the top to hang it by, and I need to attach the arms and bottom cap to the spindle. Then I need to put some stars on the ends of the arms, and candle cups to hold the candles from. Then it is done. I am looking for a bright light source to illuminate a space, particularly during a power outage. I’d like to find a nice place to hang it, but as we have electrical lighting installed, that may prove to be difficult. I think the next trick will be to work out component parts that I can make several of at once. Then I can put several of them together at once. Doing this one has shown me some concerns that I would like to resolve prior to going full production. But I look forward to putting some up for sale at the Farmer’s Markets and maybe I can have some ready to ship and put together by the buyer. I don’t think that would be too hard to do. I am currently thinking that the price for one will come in around $250. I was looking at $100 or $150 originally, but the labor required is a lot, and I would have to work something out in my mass production schedule to do that. Some of the parts will have to have specific sizes to do that, then use something like a router to put some of the notches and channels in. That would greatly simplify the project and could cut the cost. But using a hand chisel and doing this kind of work is labor intensive.
We will be opening the art shop tomorrow. I will also be looking for a job of some sort. We’ll see how that goes. I could do with preselling a couple of thousand of the chandeliers, though. I would get right to work on them! They would look great at a wedding!
The weather on the farm is still kind of strange. We still don’t have snow sitting on the ground. Not in any serious amounts anyway. It has reached down below 20F already at bedtime. It will be cold by morning. Well, colder than it is now! The high temps over the next week will be running in the high twenties and low thirties till next weekend, according to the current ten-day forecast. Then it is suggesting that the temps will drop, but we will see, as that is a way out still for the computers to model accurately. Hard to believe it is almost mid-January, and there is not snow on the ground here.