Introduction: Steel Ball in Wooden Cage

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The steel in a wooden cage makes for an excellent distraction while you are relaxing at home.

While travelling on holiday, I visited a woodwork shop and picked up some small scrap pieces of wood, including a hardwood call 'black wood'. Back home I wondered what to do with the pieces of wood and knew I had a short window of opportunity as they would soon be assigned to be a 'sometime project'. This steel in a wooden cage project follows on from making a noise maker and uses a similar carving technique.

Supplies

Scap piece of wood

Dremel like drill

Saw

Sandpaper

Aluminum or Steel ball

Step 1: Bit of Cutting

The scrap piece of wood I had was an odd shape and needed to be cut into a rectangle. This was done with a hand saw.

Step 2: Bit of Sanding

The wood was the smoothed with different grades of sandpaper, I started with 40 grit, as it is very aggressive and finally finished with some 120 grit sandpaper.

Step 3: Bit of Marking

Draw rails around the edges. I made them 6mm from the edge and used the 'old builders' trick' of gliding the pencil with one finger resting on the wood as a glide.

Step 4: Bit of Drilling

  • Hold a ruler along the drawn lines and attach it with some blue tac.
  • Drill very small holes next to each other just deeper than the rail's width, along the edge of the ruler.
  • Move the ruler to the other corner edge, secure with blue tack and drill more holes.

I discovered hard wood is difficult to drill and it turned out to be more a burning of holes than cutting, with the drill needing to cool down after drilling a few holes.


Step 5: Bit of Carving

  • Use a carving knife or pocketknife with the smaller blade, cut away the wood.
  • Do this around the other edges and remove the waste wood in the middle to make a wooden cage.

Step 6: More Carving

Once to bulk of wood has been removed, use the blade of the knife to tidy up where the drill holes have been made.

Step 7: More Sanding

Sand to make smooth, using different grades of sandpaper.

Step 8: Fitting a Ball

I had read that by socking the wooden cage in hot water for half an hour the wooden rails would become flexible enough to insert a sold ball. But I found it didn't have much of an effect on the hard wood and I realized if a solid ball was inserted the cage would break. As I didn't want to do this, another approach was required.

My approach was to roll up a piece of aluminum foil into a ball and compressed it by tapping with a hammer. This created a hard aluminum ball which still had enough give to be able to squeeze into the wooden cage.

 Some weeks later I found you can buy different sized steel ball from AliExpress, so I replaced the aluminum ball with a 20mm steel ball. By squeezing the aluminum ball out as the steel ball was squeezed in this created an opposing force which prevented the wood from breaking.

Step 9: Oil It Up

Oil the wood with a suitable wood oil to bring out the colours of the wood.