This is a grasshopper pull toy that I’ve made for my daughter. She saw a picture of one and fell in love with it, so now she’s getting one for Christmas.
When it rolls, the legs go up and down. It’s quite fun.
The wheels and eyes are made from Corian, the body is saman, and the legs are some mysterious hardwood from something I salvaged for its wheels.
…but it’s getting there.
I don’t know how many times I read through the book Step-By-Step Knifemaking when I was a teen. I even “made” a couple of knives buy buying pre-made blades and then affixing handles onto them.
Then a couple of weeks ago, my dad showed me this video which shows how to make a simple knife using extremely simple methods. I decided that I needed to finally give it a go.
So, yesterday I passed by a used tool store and bought some old files, just like are used in the video. Last night I discovered that, yes, our wood-burning stove gets hot enough to anneal steel, and I spent a good part of today shaping the blade to what you see here.
The next step is to finish gathering all the parts for my brake drum forge so that I can harden this knife. When that’s done, I’ll put a handle on it.
I started this biplane March of last year after I made a biplane for my daughter and liked it so much I wanted an unpainted one for myself. I just barely finished it.
It is made from maple (fuselage and wheels) , oak (wings and landing gear), cherry (dowels), teak (propeller), and mahogany (propeller pin).
I was doing some prototyping for a toy locomotive I’m thinking about making, and it got out of hand. Before I knew it, I had turned that prototype into a full-fledged toy.
As usual, the wheels are Corian. The wood is Saman, a Venezuelan wood, and the axles are brass rod which I found at a local recycling center.
I made my first 2 yoyos today. The first one is made from Oregon Walnut. It’s a little chunky. The next wooden one I make will probably be smaller both in thickness and diameter.
The second one is made from Corian. I like its the size more, but even with all the hollowing out I did, it’s still heavier than I prefer.
Both of them have fixed brass axles.
They’re not the best yoyos in the world, but they go down, sleep, and come back up.
Where I come from, that’s called a success.
Now that I have the materials required to polish Corian, I took some of my larger pieces and made some cutting boards for our kitchen.
The latest toy I’ve made out of Corian is tiling blocks:
So far I’ve made squares, half-square right triangles, equilateral triangles, parallelograms, and 3 sizes of rectangles. They all fit together, with all their sides (with the exception of the hypotenuse of the right triangle) being equal or multiples of each other.
If you really want, you can treat them like normal blocks and play with them in 3D space as well:
The big problem with them is that since we’re giving them to the kids for Christmas, I’m not allowed to share this exciting new toy with them yet, which is absolutely horrible. Woe is me.
I was so pleased with out the Coran discs turned out, that I went looking for something else to make on my lathe out of Corian.
The object of the puzzle is to move the rings so that they’re both on the same loop.
I’ve made puzzles like this before, and I helped a group of Boy Scouts make them for their woodworking merit badge, but this is the first time I’ve bothered trying to make a nice version.
It turned out OK.
The wood is mahogany, and the rings are Corian.
Once he was taught the trick of how to solve it, I gave my eldest the assignment of counting how many steps it takes to complete the the Tower of Hanoi puzzle for when there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 discs. Then I was going to sit down with him and explore that relationship.
Instead, he comes to me with a chart showing the number of moves it would take with up to 20 discs. And they were right.
He noticed the pattern himself and “cheated” by applying the formula instead of counting it out by hand.
I’m so proud.
We then went on to calculate that if The Flash could do one million steps per second, it would still take him longer than the age of the universe to solve a 100-disc version.
I tried my hand at turning Corian this week. It was harder than I thought it would be, but I finally got it working.
So, I was able to make a Towers of Hanoi puzzle.
The discs are two different colors of Corain, the base is mahogany, and the dowels are cherry. It’s finished with mineral oil.
