When I was overseas I amassed a pretty good-sized collection of foreign coins. All the pounds, francs, drachma, marks, etc, lived in an old CD container for a decade and a half until my son discovered them a few months ago.
He has a blast rifling through all the coins and he is especially delighted to hunt for the six coins that have holes in them (Spanish 25-peseta pieces). He likes to count the metal discs (well, up to 14, anyway) and attempts to "sort" them, although I have yet to deduce his binning strategy...
The plastic CD container filled with shifting coins is too large and awkward for a just-two-year-old to carry around. My temporary solution was to give him the fancy wooden cigar box his birthing day "hey I'm a new dad" cigars came in, with the intention of making a similarly sized wooden treasure chest later.
It didn't take me long to realize that by solving the minor carrying problem I accidentally created a danger. The cigar box is about one-third the size of the CD holder, so now several pounds of metal were now concentrated in a much smaller area and was just as awkward for him to carry.
Yikes. Something had to be done to fix the now-obvious potential toe-breaking hazard.
I wanted a place where he could have access to the coins but not be tempted to haul them around en masse. Searching through my scrap wood bin I discovered some leftover material from a toybox I made for him. I also found some scrap one-eighth-inch clear plastic from a previous picture frame project.
It was a leftover dowel in the bin, though, that got me to thinking about the Plinko game from the Price Is Right. You know... the one where the contestants drop plastic disks down a 10-foot-high, nearly vertical board embedded with hundreds of metal posts with prize bins at the bottom.
Well, let's scale that down a bunch, make the posts wood instead of metal, and replace the bins with a simple tray to catch the coins instead.
The plexiglass cover sits in routed grooves with a permanent wood stop at the bottom and a removable one at the top. This is to allow me to slide out the window easily if it gets damaged or if and when something gets jammed in there and can't be dislodged by other means. This WILL happen. Its just a matter of time.
The posts were spaced to allow for most (but not all) of the coins to bounce freely from top to bottom.
Why not all? Two reasons. 1) Some of the coins are fairly large (like the British 50 pence pieces) so if I spaced the posts for that diameter the smaller ones could drop straight through the spacings without hitting a single post. 2) I am making this out of leftover materials in my garage, and I didn't have enough wood (of this type) to space the posts an integer number of "large coin diameter + dowel diameter + a smidge" apart. Even if I did, the contraption would have to be much wider and taller than it is now to support enough posts to make this fun to play with.
It actually took longer to make this (about 5 hours) than I thought it would. A lot of this was design work since I was just making it up as I went, but a huge amount of time was spent just routing the guides for the Plexiglas window. I have a plunge router jig and a 1/8th inch bit for my aged Dremmel but I nearly burned it up just trying to make two twelve-inch shallow grooves in the pine board. It really complained when it hit a knot and there was a lot of waiting around while the tool cooled down.
After initial assembly and sanding I was in the garage giving the project a few test plinks when my son poked his head out of the kitchen door to see what I was doing. He smiled and said "Daddy, can I play with it?"
Even though it was not "done" it was definitely "done enough" to use, so I figured it would be a good idea to see him beta test it. This would give me an idea of changes I need to make before I commit to staining and sealing it.
I put it down in his playroom with the coins and watched him for a long while he dropped every single one of the hundreds of coins down the board. He was content and quiet and "on task" the whole time. He didn't even mind when the 100 drachma pieces got occasionally hung up on the edges - he just says "That one got stuck" and gets them going again by tilting the Plinko game a little to the left or right.
No big changes needed. Cool. It looks like we have a winner.
Now all that's needed before staining and sealing is to gussy up the top by adding a simple decorative piece with some words or a design or something. I was considering using the Dremmel/router for that but I am re-thinking that since it was such a hassle to route the window grooves.
I'll post another pic when it is "done-done".
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment