Pin Box Puzzle

A buddy of mine from our Bonsai Club is into wooden puzzles. He came to me wanting help making some of them since he didn’t have a work shop.

Not sure how many of you LJ’s have seen this one so I’ll explain.

The first of these pictures is what I call a pin box puzzle (I don’t know what it is really called) made out of pine.This puzzle wasn’t finished sanded, no edge routing or anything just rough. We cleaned it up before we took pictures.

How this one worked was the top screwed into the bottom. Pins in the bottom (the maker used cut nails) when turned upside down slid into matching holes in the top and were held there with magnets thus locking the top so it would not turn apart.

You can see were the holes were randomly drilled to hold the magnets. In this one the nails could fall out onto the floor and be lost.

The button that is shown is a decoy and has nothing to do with separating the top form bottom. Separating the top from bottom only takes slapping the bottom in the palm of your hand which drops the pins held by the magnets into the bottom allowing the top to be unscrewed from the bottom.

I thought this was pretty neat and would be fun to make but needed some redesigning and they had to be made out of some nice looking exotic woods. I didn’t like seeing where holes were drilled to put the magnets or buttons, the sloppy fit of the pins and that the pins could be lost when they fell out.

The ones I made are out of exotic woods, you can’t see any drill holes, won’t break, the pin (I only need one) won’t fall out.

I made ten of them out of different woods, put the push button in different places, put the pin in either the top or bottom and gave them away to family and friends for Christmas.

But best of all I laughed so hard I was brought to tears when my one son (he’s like me) spent 40 minutes trying to solve the puzzle by turning it, pulling it, shaking it, pushing the button but couldn’t figure it out. My wife finally showed him how to open it.

Hope you enjoy.

-- Dale, Ohio