Legend of Zelda Treasure Chest With Sound!

This instructable will show you how to build a Legend of Zelda Treasure chest that makes the iconic treasure chest sound when you open it.

1/4" Pine plywood. You can use whatever type of wood you want, but pine looks nice and is relatively cheap.
You'll need enough wood to cut out the following pieces:

Two 5.5" x 10.5" pieces
One 8" x 10.5" base piece
Two 8.5 x 5.5" pieces
Five 2 7/16" x 11" slats
Also you will need two 6 sided half a decagon pieces. This sounds confusing but I've included a template to cut these pieces out. Print the template out and cut the pieces to be 8" wide at the base.

You'll also need:
Wood glue
Black poster board
A cheap mp3 player
Treasure chest opening mp3
Soldering iron
Solder and flux
Some small gauge wire (20 or 22 gauge will work)
SPDT lever switch from radio shack
Small audio amp. I used a cheap ipod speaker amp from the pharmacy.
Enough Black felt to line the inside of the chest, about eight 8 1/2" x 11" sheets.
150 black furniture nails.
Ruler
Long straight edge
A couple black sharpie markers.
Hot glue gun
Super glue
Minwax Red Oak woodstain
Brush to apply stain with
Pliers or wire cutters
A couple of hinges.
Furniture clamps
A means to cut your wood. (Radial arm saw, table saw, band saw, whatever saw you have access to)

You'll need to cut the following pieces out:

Two 5.5" x 10.5" pieces (Front and back)
One 8" x 10.5" piece (Base)
Two 8.5 x 5.5" pieces (Left and right sides)
Five 2 7/16" x 11" slats (for the chest lid)
Also you will need two 6 sided half a decagon pieces. This sounds confusing but I've included a template to cut these pieces out. Print the template out and cut the pieces to be 8" wide at the base.


I used a radial arm saw for most of the pieces and a miter saw for the decagon pieces. You can pretty much use whatever saw you can get your hands on.

I used gorilla brand wood glue to glue everything together. You should assemble your pieces so that the base of the chest is 8.5" x 11" when you're done. The five slats you cut will be the chest lid will be glued across the two decagon pieces. It's hard to explain, but the pictures should make sense of it all.

Go ahead and use your wood glue and clamps to get everything glued together. For the lid I wasn't able to clamp the pieces together, so I just held the joints by hand for a few minutes until the glue would hold without my help

Once you've got everything glued in place, wait at least 24 hours before you handle anything.

I used Red Oak color Minwax brand woodstain. Set up some cardboard or newspaper to stain on so you don't get the stain on anything important. It's called stain for a reason, it will stain any surface it lands on.

You'll need a brush or a rag to apply your stain with. i used a cheap brush from walmart. I didn't stain the inside of the chest since I was just going to line the inside with felt later anyways.

Once you've stained everything you'll need to let it dry out for a day or two. You can work on it sooner than that, but it will smell pretty strong.

Before you add any details you'll need to add your hinges. I used hot glue to attach mine, it shouldn't be too difficult.

Once you've got your hinges installed you can start adding the details. There are a lot of lines that I chose to add with a sharpie marker instead of actually using multiple pieces of wood. One could argue that you should just cut more wood pieces to achieve these lines, but it's a lot less work to use sharpie, and a lot easier to do.

After you've added your detail lines you can add For the black trim around the edges I cut 5/8" strips of my black posterboard. After cutting the strips to the proper lengths, I used small dabs of super glue to attach them to the chest. You'll need to cut some angled pieces for the trim on the sides of the chest lid.

Once you've glued all the trim pieces on, you can start adding your furniture nails. You'll need to cut the nail part down to about 1/8" with your wire cutters or pliers. The furniture nails I used were too long otherwise. I just shoved the furniture tacks in by hand. If you're having a hard time pushing the nails into your chest you can drill holes for them. I didn't have to however.

For the Keyhole, I simply cut out a rectangular piece of posterboard, 2 1/2" x 1 3/4" and cut a key shaped in the center and glued a glossy piece of black paper behind it.

If any of your posterboard edges are white, you can go back and very carefully black them out with your sharpie. I did this in a few areas to make things look nicer.

This step is completely optional but is really cool. If you don't care to add sound, you can  skip this and go straight lining the inside.

To prepare the electronics, the first thing you'll need to so is load your mp3 onto your mp3 player. You're going to want this to be the only file on the mp3 player, so that every time you hit play it plays this sound. Once you've got your mp3 player loaded up, it's time to disassemble it. Once you've got it taken apart you need to wire leads to the play button.

You need to wire the leads from the play button to your SPDT lever switch. This switch should have 3 pins, normally open, normally closed, and common. These will be labeled NO, NC, and C. You're going to wire to the pins C and NC. This way, when the chest is closed and pressing the switch, the play button is disconnected, while opening the chest will activate the play button. Once you've got your switch wired, go ahead and glue it into the chest so that the lever is depressed when the chest is closed.  Once you've done this, plug your speaker amp into the mp3 and secure everything to the bottom of the chest with hot glue.

With the electronics installed and working, you can start cutting pieces of felt and gluing them to the inside. 

To conceal the electronic parts, I cut out a piece of cardboard that fit snuggly in the bottom of the chest and glued felt to it. This false bottom will hide the inner workings and make everything look nice and clean.

You're done! Enjoy your treasure chest! Now you've got a great place to store all your favorite Legend of Zelda collectibles!