Stacking Blocks
After showing a couple of toys built from wood scraps during a SAWS zoom meeting, a member expressed interest in plans for the same.
In response, I assembled this article to display photographs and provide templates with brief instructions for anyone wishing to duplicate my creation.
This project should be appropriate for children aged two years and older. Dimensions are not critical; print the patterns at 100% and take measurements from them.
The base is 3/4 inch oak and the disks are 3/8 inch thick. Use spray adhesive to attach printed patterns to scraps of wood leftover from previous projects (sizes can be adjusted to accommodate materials available).
The base pattern requires two to pages to print; use the alignment marks to join the two pages.
Tips
Prepare the base, including edge treatment, before gluing dowels in place.
The pins are 1/4 inch dowels with the top shaped to a shallow cone, to allow the disks to fall into place more easily, but not sharp enough to be unsafe.
Drill the 1/4 inch base holes using the supplied pattern; use a drill press to ensure all pins stand vertically (ensuring disks fall into place freely). Maintain a constant base orientation with the drill press table, to minimise any error due to the table not being perfectly perpendicular to the drill bit.
Carefully align and drill holes in one disk of each shape at 17/64 inch. Use these disks when gluing the dowels into the base piece, to help the dowels remain parallel during glue-up (keep the alignment disks at the top of the pins until the glue has set).
Drill holes in all disks to 9/32 inch (or larger if necessary) to ensure the disks easily fall into place on the dowel clusters.
Chamfer the edges of all disk holes, to make alignment easier when placing disks on pins.
Make each disk set from a different species (I used walnut, maple and cherry) to add interest.
Templates
PDF templates for the base and pieces can be downloaded here.
