Thread: Jumping Frog

Love the Frog Charleville.....
Great decoration too...

Ruddy

great job, the kids will love it im sure.

Yeah, with that noise and the movement, the young 'un is bound to love it!

From my experience, these wooden pull-along animated toys need to last at least 7.5 years. After that, they can sometimes still warrant attention from kids going on eight years of age. Well done, I love animated wooden toys.

Thanks for the nice comments, folks.


I have to admit that I am likely to regret handing the frog over to its new owner tomorrow. I am really enjoying playing with it myself.


"Hmmm! That sniffing hound pattern in that book looks good. I wonder what materials I have in my scrap box ...."


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Charleville, the same book "How to make animated toys" by David Wakefield that contains the plan for the frog also has an excellent design for a pull-along hopping kangaroo, complete with joey in the pouch. I"ve made quite a few for young kids, who seem to love them.
Keith McCarthy.

Originally Posted by Keith McCarthy

Charleville, the same book "How to make animated toys" by David Wakefield that contains the plan for the frog also has an excellent design for a pull-along hopping kangaroo, complete with joey in the pouch. I"ve made quite a few for young kids, who seem to love them.
Keith McCarthy.

Thanks Keith.


I was going to make the hound dog as the next toy and had not really considered making the kangaroo because I thought that it may have been too top-heavy.

Not so?


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Well done on the frog Charleville, looks great

Top job Charleville .... I was just looking at your frog when the Stinkette sat down next to me ..... I said that I liked it and I wanted to make one ..... She then saw the cover of the book and said that I had a copy ..... after a quick search of the study I can confirm that she is in fact correct ...... I might have a go this weekend .

Originally Posted by Sir Stinkalot

Top job Charleville .... I was just looking at your frog when the Stinkette sat down next to me ..... I said that I liked it and I wanted to make one ..... She then saw the cover of the book and said that I had a copy ..... after a quick search of the study I can confirm that she is in fact correct ...... I might have a go this weekend .

The 3 pics from the first post are missing for me now

Originally Posted by AUSSIE

The 3 pics from the first post are missing for me now

Not sure that I understand that. I still see them.



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Originally Posted by Sir Stinkalot

Top job Charleville .... I was just looking at your frog when the Stinkette sat down next to me ..... I said that I liked it and I wanted to make one ..... She then saw the cover of the book and said that I had a copy ..... after a quick search of the study I can confirm that she is in fact correct ...... I might have a go this weekend .

Good on you. You might like to know that I was delighted with the outcome and the interesting thing was that when I gave the frog to my three year old grand-daughter, both she and her 1 1/2 year old sister were also delighted with it. This is significant because their house is overrun with toys, many of which have electronic voices in them and other electronic gimmickry.

I changed a couple of very minor things on the frog design

1. I used slightly larger dowels for the wheel axles simply because I had some 8 mm dowel on hand and no 6 mm dowel as specified.

2. In the book, all of the toys are oiled whereas, of course, I painted mine. Because he oils his, the author often uses dowels in the toys as spots and sands them flat accordingly so that the different wood colour and texture shows through the oil. In the case of the frog, he does a similar thing in relation to the eyes, viz he uses dowel for the eyes but sands it flat. I did something a little different in that I used 8 mm dowel as the eyes and did not sand it flat but instead left it a little longer so that the eyes stick out a bit from the surface. This was after, I had sanded their ends round in a drill press. I like the look of the eyes protruding a bit and then leaving them in natural wood (estapoled) against the painted surface.

After searching unsuccessfully for east coast suppliers, I bought the axle pegs for the legs from Timbecon in Perth. They seem to be the only Aussie supplier of such little pegs. I bundled up a larger order of wheels and pegs to offset the cost of postage. Those pegs are of very good quality and handled the pounding of a large hammer into a glued interference fit with no problems. If you have a lathe, you can make your own, of course.

Also, I like to use a router to machine all of my parts to be exactly the same and had some difficulties in routing the small pieces safely until I made up a jig with a bit of perspex and some scrap wood which worked a treat. This is shown in this thread ... https://www.woodworkforums.com/f20/routing-pieces-safely-98565


Have fun!


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Originally Posted by AUSSIE

The 3 pics from the first post are missing for me now

The pics are back.Maybe the hosting prog was down for maintanance.It was 3 AMwhen I saw it