Child's TeePee

Another of my wife’s projects that I was sucked into (I complain a lot when this happens but secretly these are my favorite projects because we get to work on them together) was a tee-pee for our nephew.

My part of the project was to create the tent poles.  Other instructionals said to use PVC or closet poles.  These would both have worked but the price of a closet pole is several times more expensive than the solution I came up with and we thought pvc would have looked cheesy.

My poles were created by purchasing 2x4’s and then trimming them into octagons with the table saw.

There are a lot of cuts but the entire process was less than 15 minutes.

Here is how to cut the 2x4’s into an octagon:

Step 1, rip the 2x4 into a square.  Set your guard at 1.5” to match the thickness of the 2x4.  You can then run the scrap through again to create two 2x2’s (they will actually measurement 1.5” x 1.5”)

Next set your blade at 45 degrees and adjust the guard to around 1 1/8”.  You’ll want to test this cut on a scrap piece to verify it cuts the right amount off the corner to create the octagon.

After you make the first cut, rotate the board 90 degrees and cut the next edge off.  You’ll make this cut a total of 4 times for each board.

That’s it!  Once you have the boards cut, sand them to remove any saw marks and you’ll end up with poles that look like they were hand shaped from branches for a fraction of the cost of perfectly round closet poles.  The rest of the tee-pee build was done using instructions found at…