Slide of the Month: Smiley

  February 2025

  Time to make: .5 hours

  Finishing: 1 hour

 
  Boy's Life April 1974, page 66

 
 Original design:  William Fleming & John Taylor











It's February and typically this is the month most Scouters feel down. Tired of it being cold and dark thinking they may never see the sun again. Well buck up Spring is around the corner!

A very simple slide to make! The slide is a wooden drawer knob that can be found at most hardware stores. Paint it yellow with your favorite paint. (I used some glossy spray paint I had kicking around.) When it was dry I used a black paint pen to make the happy face but you could also use a black sharpie marker too. Might be a 70's throwback but still fun to make and wear.

Slide of the Month Extra: Philmont French Henry Ore Cart

 
January 2025

Time to make: 3 hours

Finishing: 1.5 hour


Original design:  Philmont/Bill Macfarlane








Back in May of 2022, I had done a slide for French Henry with a gold mining pan based on the Philmont patch. Well didn't Philmont come out with another patch to make me scratch my head and think "how am I going to make that one?".  I worked a lot of ideas in my head some of which included some old HO train track from when I was younger. But the whole thought of both bringing this to a 3D reality while keeping the perspective was baffling me. I drew it out on paper - no good. Tried modeling programs - no good. Finally I just took a piece of basswood and started carving.

The cart is all one carving and somehow I kept it all together without having to resort to making several pieces and gluing them together. (The only exceptions are the dirt, which is some tile floor grout I had around, the pebbles painted gold from my back yard, and the pickax I carved.) I was quite pleased with the basic ore cart and was getting ready to carve the frame the hopper would pivot on when a thought came to mind. What if I used the space between the cart ends and the hopper to hold the neckerchief?

To finish this off I painted each element (except the grout) with hobby paints, labeled the lettering with water slide paper, and gave the slide a couple coats of poly. 

Slide of the Month: Abacus

  January 2025

 Time to make: 3 hours

  Finishing: 1 hour

 
  Boy's Life August 1987, page 64

 
  Original design:  Tell & Don Gubler










It is said that the Babylonian's created the abacus as one of the earliest methods of counting and calculations before written numbers. Though I can do simple addition and subtraction, apparently multiplication, division, square and cube roots can also be done on an 

abacus. The Roman abacus could even do simple fractions (ie. 1/4, 1/2,  and 1/12). I guess I'll stick to binary because after all "there are 10 kinds of people in the world who know binary".

This slide looked so simple to make...It ended up taking a lot of painstaking work.

Made from some scrap black walnut, the first task I had was to make a simple frame. Not as easy as it seems because the angle had to be nearly perfect. Next I needed to cut slots in the top and bottom for the wood on the inside and these had to line up just right. Gluing was another challenge since I did not have clamps small enough to hole the pieces in place at a right angle. The rods were drilled in place using quilting pins and as the pin penetrated the wood, I added the beads. Once the pins had come through the far side, I clipped the pins off with wire cutters. Using a fine metal file, I filed the pins flush with the wood. Butcher's wax was used to finish the slide off.