Maple teethers

Wow, never seen a wooden teether before. Beats having them chew on the crib rails.

-- No, I don't want to buy the pink hammer.

I have to laugh at you “raising the grain” as there will be plenty of that going on in use. If you want to make it really interesting for them make the teethers out of a checkerboard of dark and light woods, they’ll stare at it for hours.
Good way to introduce them to the craft. Measure nothing, cut many times!
gene

-- [email protected] : dovetail free since '53, critiques always welcome.

Yeah I figure they will be helping me prepare for future sandings! Mostly I wanted to be sure nothing went wrong when they got wet, particularly for the gift one.

Very nice finish of the teether. Is there any other wood than maple for making them?

Sharad

-- “If someone feels that they had never made a mistake in their life, then it means they have never tried a new thing in their life”.-Albert Einstein

Now this is out of my realm as I never had kids but seems like a great idea and they look very nice.

-- Randy - If I'm not on LJ's then I'm making Saw Dust. Please feel free to visit my store location at http://www.facebook.com/randy.blackstock.custom.wood.designs

Thanks Sharad; I’m not sure. I think I have seen them made of cherry as well, but mostly the ones I’ve seen online have been maple.

Last night my son discovered that the teether is also excellent for banging on other toys; then he got it stuck on a protrusion on the other toy and had to figure out how to get it off. An all-around learning tool!

That’s pretty neat, useful tool!
Nice work!!!

-- Robert B. Sabina, Ohio..... http://www.etsy.com/shop/WoodenfrogWoodenProd

Ill be making a bunch of these for my little guy. Hes 10 weeks today and drooling like a faucet. Teeth cant be that far off. Thanks for the inspiration Elizabeth.

-- Its not a crack, its a casting imperfection.

looks good.

what are the dimensions?

I don’t remember offhand, but the holes are 1 1/2 diameter. The width is whatever the scrap was that I had lying around – I think it was a little over 2 1/2 inches – and I cut them to length after drilling the second hole, just eyeballing to get roughly the same distance between hole and edge on each end.

Elizabeth, thank you for this post. My wife is pregnant and I’ll be adding this to the list of baby projects to make. Great idea! My wife watched a documentary on plastics a couple months back and now she wants to try and avoid as many plastic toys as possible for our baby when its still teething. Lol, hey, more projects for me so I dont mind. Thanks again and great idea. I like vipond33’s suggestion as well.

-- - Eric Noblesville, IN

Nicely done Elizabeth.

Interesting about the plastics Gene. I found out a while back that the wooden teethers are probably better than most through a thread here on LJ. I asked a parent/child educator that deals with these things in her teaching. She said as long as it is BPA-free, then the plastic is considered safe. I did some googling and found What is BPA? Should I be worried about it??

I still like the wooden ones better.

-- Backer boards, stop blocks, build oversized, and never buy a hand plane--

Elizabeth, great and useful project! How has it held up? Anything you’d do differently? Thanks for sharing.

-- God bless, Candy

He hasn’t played with it much, actually. Not terribly keen on teethers in general. I think I would have made it a little thinner (but the scrap was too short for my planer), as long as it wasn’t so thin that it might crack if someone stepped on it the wrong way.