Steel Ball in Wooden Cage

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.

Scap piece of wood

Dremel like drill

Saw

Sandpaper

Aluminum or Steel ball

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

Sand to make smooth, using different grades of sandpaper.

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.

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