The random orbital sander is the tool I get asked about most often by beginner toy makers, right after the mitre saw. It is the difference between a 10-minute sand and a 60-minute hand-sand on a single block of pine. It is also one of the cheapest power tools you can buy — even a […]
A wooden baby gym is one of those toys that looks like a piece of design furniture and earns its place from week one. My daughter spent the first six months of her life under hers, batting at the dangling rings and grasping for the wooden teether. It folds flat when she napped, which mattered […]
My first "workshop" was a corner of a one-bedroom apartment with a Black & Decker Workmate, three cordless tools, and a vacuum cleaner pulled in from the lounge for dust collection. I built nine toys there before we moved to a house with a garage. The lesson I took with me: a small space limits […]
When my daughter was three, I gave her a small hammer, a block of pine, and a jar of fat-headed nails. Two hours later she'd driven twelve nails (eight of them sideways), bashed her thumb once, and announced she was a builder. I've never been prouder of a Sunday afternoon. That session — and the […]
A wooden toy with a fresh beeswax finish looks like a wooden toy in a magazine. A wooden toy after a year of being chewed, drooled on, dropped, and wiped down looks dry, grey, and tired. The good news: bringing it back is a fifteen-minute job. The better news: each renewal makes the toy look […]
The mitre saw is the most expensive tool you'll buy as a hobby toy-maker, and the one that defines what you can build. A bad mitre saw turns every cut into a wrestling match. A good one cuts so accurately that you stop noticing the saw and start noticing the wood. I've owned three across […]
If you're raising a kid you'd like to one day work with wood, build them their own workbench. Not a toy bench with plastic tools — a real, kid-scaled workbench they can hammer on, drill at, screw into, and grow into. My daughter got hers at three. By four, she was driving real screws into […]
A simple marble run is the build that turns a casual kid into a budding engineer. Mine certainly did. The first time I set up a five-piece run on the kitchen floor, my daughter watched the marble roll, asked why it slowed down at the turn, and tried to rebuild the run to make the […]
An activity board (or "busy board") is the high-leverage toddler toy nobody talks about enough. It's a single flat board covered with locks, latches, switches, beads, gears, and other things a one-to-three year old loves to fiddle with. Done right, an activity board absorbs a toddler's attention for genuinely long stretches — the only toy […]
A wooden teether is one of the most thoughtful baby-shower gifts you can give — and one of the most rewarding small builds in the workshop. It also has the lowest tolerance for shortcuts in the whole MAKE series, because it's the one toy that's designed to be mouthed. Get the wood wrong, get the […]