Come rain or shine, this umbrella stand project is the perfect way to while away those long rainy days and expand your woodworking skills.

Featuring a unique design to hold your wet umbrella, with a tray to catch the drips, this stand is a great addition to your hallway or porch during those soggy months.

This project incorporates some clever routing tricks to help form the dowel sections, a useful shortcut if you don't have access to a woodturning lathe.

Watch our Woodworking Wisdom video or read our guide below to learn how to make your umbrella stand.

Make the top and lower rings

Begin by cutting the top and bottom rings on a bandsaw using a simple circle cut jig. These start off as 335mm squares of 18mm MDF. Find the centre by drawing lines corner to corner and then drill a 3mm hole through the board on the central point. This drilled hole allows the boards to be located on the pin on the circle cut jig. Cut the outer circle out first, aiming for a circle of about 310mm diameter. All four pieces can be cut. 

To cut the inner circle, reset the pin location within the circle jig to produce a circle of about 210mm. Load the circular disc onto the jig. With the saw running, feed the circle cut jig with the workpiece held in position up to the stop limiter on the underside of the jig. Gently rotate the work until the circle is cut out. Turn the saw off and allow the blade to stop, and then remove the ring section by back feeding through the crosscut line. This can be repeated to create the four rings.

Glue the MDF rings together in pairs, ensuring that the crosscut line is in different positions, and not lined up. Check that the outer circular shape lines up.

How to Make an Umbrella Stand

Make the base

The wooden section within the base starts as two pieces of machined timber that are about 310mm x160mm x 48mm. To allow these to be cut using the circle cut jig, they are temporally fixed onto two bits scrap ply board approximately 400mm x240mm.  The plywood has a scribed line that is set in about 40mm in along one long face. The half way measurement (200mm) is marked and drilled central along its length with the 3mm drill. 

From this drilled location draw onto the plywood the half circular shape, these are 285mm and 220mm diameter. A small vee will need to be cut into the timber so that it can fit around the 3mm location pin. Screw through the plywood and into the timber to hold this in place ensuring that these screws are not on the cut-out lines. Load this onto the circle jig and cut out the rings. Do the outer cut first, stopping the cut and back feeding when the timber is cut, leaving a short section of ply to hold this together.

With the two half round ring sections cut out, dry fit them together. If these come together cleanly, they can be glued, clamped and left to dry.

While these are drying, the bottom plywood disc can be cut out in the same way to make a disc of 250mm diameter, by 12mm thick.

How to Make an Umbrella Stand

Make the dowels

These are made using a router table and a roundover cutter with a radius of 12.7mm. To make it safe to hold these when these are passed

through the cutter, a simple jig was made to accurately hold the lengths of timber.

The sections of timber fit accurately into the jig; these are held in place using a woodscrew from each end. To do this, mark the 400mm lengths of 25mm square ash on the ends to find the centre point and drill a pilot hole. 

The router table is set up with a false fence, which makes it easier to run the length of the work through. This also improves the extraction. Hold the work in the jig, pass it through the cutter to remove one corner. Rotate the work through 90 degrees to the next face, fix in place and machine until all four have been cut. Three lengths are required.  


Round the edges

The same roundover cutter is used to profile the edge of the top and bottom MDF rings. To cut the outer edges, the faults fence is removed, and the main fence moved forward and opened to allow a contact point with the bearing of the cutter. This makes this safer and again the extraction works better.

To do the internal edges, two handles can be fitted to hold it steady. Use the original corner to corner lines, mark the central point between the inner and outer ring, then drill a 4mm hole all the way through. Use some scrap material to make the temporary handles and screw these in place from the underside, ensuring that the screw heads are not proud of the surface.

Move the fence out of the way, and machine the internal edges. The base ring only needs one internal edge completed, but the top ring needs both. With this done, the 4mm holes need to be drilled out to 6mm. Next, sand the rings and dowels. The natural wood ring also needs sanding on the external face. 

Add any further finishes - we have chosen to paint the MDF rings with blackboard paint. Once dry, we applied a few light coats of finishing oil.


Assemble the umbrella stand

In the underside of the base, ring two T nuts are inserted into the MDF.

The holes in the ends of the ash dowels are reamed out to 6mm diameter.  Then, cut lengths of metric M6 thread rod and glue these into place in both ends of the two sections of the dowels, using 30 minute epoxy.  With the third piece of dowel, the holes either end are reamed out and a M6 threaded insert is screwed in place. These are then cut to produce the angled chamfered shape and sanded.

Drill pilot holes through the ash ring. This can then be centralised on the MDF base ring and screwed together. The sweet tube is inserted and the base cover is screwed onto the ash ring, holding the tube in place.

To finish, screw the components together. The ash dowels are inserted into the base and tightened, the top MDF ring is inserted over the threaded rod and then the two top caps are screwed in place.  Within the base some dry clean sand can be added to add more weight and absorb any moisture, holding your umbrella stand in place.

How to Make an Umbrella Stand

Made it? Share it!

If you have made our umbrella stand, then why not share your images with is via social media? Tag us @axminstertools on Facebook and Instagram.

If you have enjoyed making this project, take a look at our boot stand project.