Refuse Bag Stand

Felled Wild Plum Tree branches

My latest project is a Refuse Bag Stand. A mate of mine needed something to put his refuse bags in at the end of the driveway that would prevent the neighborhood dogs from ripping the bags open before the Refuse Truck came to take them away. I recently felled some Wild Plum Tree branches and was looking for a way to reuse the wood and thought this would be an ideal opportunity to use them. Wild Plum Tree is indigenous to South Africa and is found in the Eastern Cape right through to Kwazulu Natal mainly along the coast.

Got my debarking technique down to fine art

What I like about the Wild Plum Tree is that it is pretty easy to debark while it's still wet, the easiest way to do it I found was to shave off the bark on two opposite sides of the branch using a panga and then lifting the remaining bark with a paint scraper and pulling it off.

It kinda felt like skinning an animal especially the way the bare wood underneath resembles bone, although I've never skinned an animal in my life I imagine this is what it must feel like minus all the gory stuff.

Once I had debarked all the wood I needed, I selected four thick branches that would form the backbone of my stand. I made two leg stands by just crossing two branches over each other and notching them in the middle to form a cross halving joint and nailed them together to keep it sturdy. I used a mitre saw to cut the cross halving joints and a 10mm wood chisel to chisel out the joint. Now that my two leg stands were sorted I fitted a decent size branch between the two and nailed it into place. So with the basic framework for my stand done all that was left to do was screw on the smaller branches that would form the "basket" where the refuse bags would be left safely out of reach from the roaming packs of dogs.

For extra stability I added four braces that attached each leg to the center "beam" of the Refuse Bag Stand.
Here's the what the finished product looks like.