My niece, Arianna, just turned two. In one of “her” blog entries I noticed that she likes building towers. Hmm. Maybe I could build her some sort of tower puzzle of some sort?

After looking on the web a bit, I saw an old toy called “Bill Ding”. It’s basically a clown-like figure, cut of wood, which can interlock together. This allows you to create stacking figures, which you can then watch topple over (the part Arianna likes the most).

The original toy, which has recently been re-manufactured, has figures of about 4 inches tall. I thought that these would be (a) too difficult for a small child and (b) too difficult for a big child (me) to cut out on the scroll saw. I’m not know for my patience, after all.

So, I fired up the computer, opened the 3-D modeling tools, and began the painstaking process of resizing the figures. NOT! This is a prime example of a process that takes longer on computer than on paper.

I pulled out my Old School Graph Paper and sketched out a double-sized version of the figures. Then I spray glued the paper template to a thin (5mm) panel. This I cut out on the Dremel Scroll Saw. Once I had my little wood template, I used him to trace out the outlines on the lumber I would be using (1×12 pine boards). The figures are about 9 inches tall.

Here’s the original photo, with me working on templates and samples:

I had cut out about 6 of the figures and was playing around with them them when — oops — I dropped one. The tip of his head broke off! Then I noticed my mistake — I hadn’t paid attention to the grain of the wood when I sketched them for cutting. I was going in the wrong direction of the grain, thereby causing weakness in the part. (I can’t take all the blame–I was trying to re-use leftover lumber.)

Here is when I was playing with them a bit. A 4 foot fall onto a concrete floor illustrated my manufacturing error:

So, instead of giving out some toys that might break too easily, I cut out 7 more figures with my handy Bosch Jigsaw. This time I made sure that the grain was in the right direction. (As an added safety measure, I used my handy electric staple gun to shoot a 5/8″ brad into the shoulders and head of each of the figures, to give them a little metal support at the weak points. We’ll see how that works out in real-world testing.)

Here is a line of figures primed with white spraypaint:

And here they are getting painted in nice bright colors (blue, red, and green):

To make spraypainting easier, I made some painting jigs out of coat hangers. They made the process a LOT easier — how I did this will be in an upcoming Sixty Second Shop episode.

It was a lot of fun making these figures. All of those cuts was made by hand with a Jigsaw, with some of the close-in work being finished on a Scroll saw. I then rounded over all of the edges with a hand orbital sander, before priming and painting. It gave me a LOT of practice on the Jigsaw.

I also made a small base that (might) make stacking them easier. I had mixed results using it, but I’m sure Arianna will do better!

If you would like to create your own version of “Bill Ding”, do a Google search on the term, and you should find some templates. I designed my own version, a little more blocky (because I was going for a robot motif instead of clown), and it works pretty well.

Download this image and print it out full size and you’ll have the template I used. The figure should be 9 inches tall (though feel free to scale up or down). Nine inches was a reasonable size to do with a Jigsaw — any small and you’ll probably have to use a (slower) Scroll saw for all of it. (I tried a couple of 4.5″ versions, and they are hard to cut out right–that’s why I went with the bigger, blockier, version.)

My template: