3 Easy-to-Make Wood Projects - Games & Puzzles

there's no shortage of games and puzzles out there and the three in this video are all easy to make and easy to play they make great gifts or they'd be right at home on your own coffee table or bookshelf let's get into it our first project dates back to 17th century France Peg solitaire there are many variations of board shape and size but this one will be 33 holes arranged in a cross-shaped design I've measured this Alder board to allow equal spaces between all the holes when it comes time to drill I spent way too long trying to do the basic math to figure out the numbers for proper spacing I'm going to make this from three pieces one long vertical piece and two shorter pieces on each side to form the horizontal of the cross on those two instead of just cross cutting two lengths from the board I'm orienting them the opposite way foreign now when I glue them all together the grain runs in the same direction across the whole thing and it should look like one solid piece of wood once it's sanded after the glue dries I'll get the holes marked out using my scientific calculations from earlier foreign to drill using a half inch forstner bit I fill the board with 33 holes [Music] then everything gets a good standing to 320 and I soften the sharp edges and Corners in the process Alder is a fairly soft wood so it's easy to shape things with sandpaper now we need a bunch of pegs 32 of them to be exact before cutting them I'm going to give this half inch oak dowel a round of sanding so the pegs can easily fit in and out of the holes without getting stuck then I'll start sawing I made this little stop block jig for the process the sharp edges on those get rounded off next it really doesn't take too much time but it is kind of a tedious step now I'll give everything a good layer of a flaxseed oil finish let it soak in then buff off the excess it really brings out the rich red tones in the Alder and I screw in some rubber feet on the bottom as the final touch [Music] now after oiling the board I realized I just did not like being able to see where the point of the drill bit went in at the bottom of each hole so I returned my dowel cutting setup from earlier and make myself a pile of slices about a sixteenth of an inch thick I put a dab of glue in each hole and pressed them all in then each one gets a bit of oil applied with a brush I think adding those to the bottom of the holes really gave it a more finished look and Peg Solitaire is done place the pegs in the holes leaving the middle one empty you jump over a peg to an empty hole horizontally or vertically and remove it from the board the objective is to end with one single Peg remaining in the center hole [Music] the next project is hair and Hounds which goes by many other names including the soldiers game and French military game I'll be making this one from a piece of mahogany or at least what a big home center calls mahogany so it's anybody's guess as to what species it actually is either way it looks nice I start by doing some measuring and marking to determine the points and lines the most common board design consists of 11 points connected by lines strategy games like this are found all over the world going back centuries once the board is marked out I can saw it to length I wanted to have a soft shape so I traced some rounded corners and then I can roughly saw them off [Laughter] I'll drill a hole at each of the 11 points using a 7 32nd inch bit with some tape on it to serve as a depth indicator I use a one two three block to help keep me reasonably honest foreign s connecting the holes can be carved in using a small V gouge next I'll round the edges with a chisel this doesn't need to be perfect since sandpaper will take care of the final shaping I start with 60 grit sandpaper to smooth it all together and finalize the Contours then I sand up to 320. once the whole board is nice and smooth I rub on a generous amount of flaxseed oil finish let it soak in then buff off the excess and like the peg Solitaire board I came to some important realizations after applying the finish here I realized that the lines cut along the grain are nearly invisible so I'm just going to fill all the lines in with some black paint if you were going all out you could inlay the lines with a contrasting wood or other material Ah that's better for the playing pieces I'm just using golf tees [Music] okay that was unnecessary I only need four of them as is they're a bit long for this board so I trimmed them down to a shorter length and round the end before painting even though it's already white the hair still gets a layer of white paint because that little bit of added thickness will make it fit better in the holes the three Hound pieces get painted red with the board and pegs done I'll brush on a clear coat to protect the paint when that's dry I lightly go over everything with fine grit sandpaper to get it to its final silky smooth finish and hair and Hounds is done the rules are simple one player is the hair and they win if they make it across the board and to the point at the opposite end the other player moves the hounds and they win if they surround the hair so it can't move on your turn you can move to an adjacent empty point that is connected by a line only one of the three hounds is moved on a turn and they can only move forward on a straight or diagonal line or side to side but never backwards in any way the hair can move in any direction [Music] our last project is the Tower of Hanoi also known as the Tower of Brahma or Lucas's Tower for this one I'll be using half inch Poplar for all the parts this board has a bit of a Twist in it but that shouldn't be a problem since I'm only using small chunks from it I need to make six discs of different diameters the largest will be four inches in diameter and each will be half an inch smaller than the last I cut out some paper Circles of all my sizes so I could figure out the most efficient layout on the board then I draw them with a compass [Music] now I'm going to drill a half inch hole in the center of each one these were nowhere near a 90 degree angle but that's fine because I'm going to use a Dremel to go around the holes and enlarge them slightly this will allow them to slide freely on the dowels with the holes drilled I cut out the circles with a saw you can make as many discs as you want for the puzzle but keep in mind that if n is the number of discs then the minimum number of moves to solve is 2 to the power of n minus one so a puzzle with three disks can be solved in seven moves but the fastest possible solution for a puzzle with 10 discs is 1023 moves this six piece puzzle will require 63 moves to solve of course you can always play with fewer to adjust the difficulty now that I have these rough circles it's time to round all the edges I bring the Dremel back out and turn these into some shapes that vaguely resemble circles I finished them off by hand sanding with 320 Grit they're far from perfect but there's no need for perfection in this or any project once all those are done the base can be laid out I start by making a center line down the board drawing the curved ends and marking the spots for the three rods then I'll saw it off and cut the curves the same way I did with the discs [Laughter] after I got it cut out I could see that the base was going to be disproportionately large so I make a couple rip cuts down the edges to make it narrower now the largest Circle will overhang the edges slightly then I cut off the ends to shorten it and remake the curves then I give it a sanding and all the edges get eased over to drill these half inch holes in the base I'm turning to this bench top drill press I recently bought a lot of the small projects I make involve drilling series of consistent straight holes and in the course of making this video I finally gave in to my inability to hold the drill anywhere near 90 degrees it would have been handy to have around for the previous two projects but these three holes are where Precision really matters if they aren't drilled exactly perpendicular to the base the rods are going to be sticking off in every direction next I figure out how long the dowels need to be to fit all the discs then I cut them to length foreign the top end gets rounded off and I can glue them in and as usual everything gets a good layer of oil and any excess is buffed off and the Tower of Hanoi is done here's how it works the discs get stacked up with the largest one on the bottom and the smallest at the top the objective is to recreate this Arrangement on one of the other two rods you do this by moving one disc at a time to a different Rod the catch is that a disc can never be placed on top of one that's smaller in size [Music] well that does it for this video little puzzles and games like these are some of my favorite things to make the dimensions are pretty arbitrary and just based on whatever material you're using and you can make them as plain or as fancy as you want they can be Pine or Rosewood they could be Palm sized or cover a whole table top hopefully there's some inspiration to be found in these three simple projects thanks for watching foreign [Music]

Channel: Landing Bird Woodworking

Views: 3,915

Keywords: woodworking

Id: YdgzxPnjDSw

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023