Japanese Style Wooden Puzzle Box Plans

If you have ever constructed wooden airplanes or remote controlled airplane models, wooden model ships or tried pen making, wooden jigsaws or wooden clocks, these beautiful objects will be easy for you to make.

You may be one of the woodworking women who have a group on Yahoo along with 764 other groups all interested in working with wood with scroll sawing or making bandsaw boxes.

The puzzle is how to open the box, and find the complicated hidden sliding panels.

Now plans are readily available to everyone to guide you by the hand, enabling you to make these puzzle boxes with a whole variety of hidden locks and sliding panels.

A few simple woodworking tools, and plenty of patience is needed, as these puzzles are very exacting.

With fine woodcraft and the proper finishing technique, you can make a fair copy of the real Japanese puzzle boxes called Himitsu-Bako or personal secret box.

The Hakone region in Japan is where these are made using a vast assortment of exotic wood for which the area is renowned for, they are usually finished with mosaic woodwork called Yosegi Zaiku, and they come with a variety of ways to open them from between 4 to 64 and even more moves.

If you can find them available at all, they are very expensive because of the skill involved, but the puzzle boxes you can make yourself will cost you no more than the cost of the wood you choose to use, and possibly a few bucks for the detailed plan.

You could possibly have some of the basic tools needed, especially if you have already tried any of the projects mentioned above, but I list them here:

A miniature bench saw. A new 4inch miniature hobby bench-top table saw is about $60.

A scroll saw. For $65 you can buy a 16" Scroll Saw with a tilting table.

A drill press. $33 buys a 4" Cross Slide Drill Press Vice Metal Milling Machine.

Also some files, sandpaper of various grades, some trigger-type clamps, stain, paint, lacquer or varnish, paint brushes, chisels and wood glue.

You must avoid areas with high temperatures and high humidity both while constructing the puzzle boxes and when displaying them, as being made of such thin material they are susceptible to warping, making even them harder to open and close.

So, are you up for the challenge?

You won’t be on your own, as like most activities now, there is help readily available on the Internet both from the plan suppliers and from fellow surfers who have already taken up this great hobby.

Check out the Homemade Puzzles site to get started with a choice of 24 free plans to make a simple puzzle and take it from there.

For an online gallery of free to use vector graphics for personal use and most of them can be used commercially. http://www.japanvector.com/

The plans to 30 more complicated plans are all priced at a very modest £2, or about $3.

Download the plans instantly and get right on with it now, and please don’t forget to come back here and tell me how you get on.

You can also see what others have made by checking out this photo bucket page.