Lewis Lamb
03-02-2006, 11:42 AM
My 2nd grader had to dress as a "100 year old" man for a school function, so we borrowed a walking cane for him from his grandmother. He decided the cane was too big for him, and from somewhere in the woods behind our house, he came up with an old bamboo shoot and asked me to make him a cane out of it. The bamboo still had part of the root cluster attached, which made a perfectly sized handhold, but the root portion was very soft, unlike the rest of the shoot. Also, there were a couple of splits in the sides of the shoot that we needed to take care of. So, to turn the stick into a cane that would hold up, I knocked out the two or three joints inside the shoot so that I could put a full-length wood dowel into it. I covered the inside walls as evenly as I could with a thick epoxy putty and then pushed the dowel in. When the epoxy finally set, the cane shaft was pretty much rock solid. I wasn't quite sure what to do to harden up the soft part of the root cluster, so I just experimented using CA glue. Basically, I just squirted crazy glue all over the end piece, let it soak in for a few minutes, then repeated the same thing a few more times. After doing that 5 or 6 times, the root piece was hard enough that it seemed like it would hold up. To finish it, I wiped it down with 2 or 3 coats of shellac, followed by about 3 coats of wipe-on poly. Then, I glued a chair leg tip onto the end of it, and voila, it was a walking cane. Eli was very pleased with the end product; he was, in his words, the only kid who didn't have to use a "hand-me-down" walking cane.
33048
33048