What age group would play with this toy?

[luvmytoolz]

One things that might make part of the process easier for you is one of the inflatable sanding attachments for bench grinders. They're often used for intarsia.

I have one that's roughly 5-6" diameter by about 6-7" long, and not quite fully inflated gives a soft sanding that easily follows contours. This would be absolutely ideal for rounding over the top edges of the dowels once you've cut and glued them in. And generally sanding all the edges too. Huge time saver with the right grit.

 

[rst]

Inflatable drums are available in various diameters that have a shaft to be chucked in a drill or drill press.  I have them from one inch to three inch.

 

[Packard]

From my perspective, the camera I made used fewer components, was much quicker to build, with far fewer setups.  And it was interactive, in that the child could pretend to take pictures.

The phone could also be interactive in that the child could pretend to be making phone calls.

I don’t know which would entertain a child more, and which would entertain a child more often.

The phone required fairly accurate depth settings on the drill press for 5 separate operations.  Also, required setups for routering the corners and another for the edges.

Also a setup to cut the dowels to length.  Not surprisingly, my table top band saw disappointed again.  I probably needed a wider blade, as it would not make square cuts on the 3/8” dowels, and stalled trying to cut the 1/2” dowels.

The setup on the table saw worked well, except it flung the 5/8” long pieces of dowel all over the place.  I had to jury rig a bin to capture the pieces. The discs for the ear piece was easy—it was cheaper to buy than to make—so purchased items.

At any rate, too much work compared to the other toys I am making.

Note: These will be for next year’s Christmas toy drive.  So no rush.  I am only planning on making about thirty toys total.  About 6 to 10 of each.

 

[squall_line]

Our two year-old son makes his own "cell phones" out of bristle blocks.  The only requirement for a "phone" in his mind is that it has to be roughly rectangular, and have a single large red button on it (my wife lets him hang up her calls when she's talking on speakerphone to grandma).  I'm usually able to convince him that whatever I made with my blocks is a phone if I hold it like a phone.

He also makes cameras out of anything with a hole in it.  He loves to look through the hole, tell you to smile, and then say "click!" and wander off.  It'll melt your dang heart, I tell ya.

Point being, most of what you see for "Montessori" type toys (other than that term being over-used) are simple, with very little adornment, and wide imaginative use.

For what it's worth, the original phone design gave me visions of the paint being abraded off of anything with a corner in my house as the phone was dragged back and forth over anything on which it would make fun noises (like when our toddler discovered the button head details on our couches and ran stuff over them repeatedly to make sounds).

For the final phone design, using a small chisel plane to flush-trim all of the protrusions would allow the "phone" to also be repurposed as a building block or wall facade, and would make the block less likely to damage other toys in use.