Labyrinth Game for Two Players

This is the first of a number of woodworking projects my wife asked me to make for the street party she organized for 235 residents on 6th June 2012 to celebrate Queen Elizabeth ll's diamond jubilee. Apart from using a router to hollow out the lid of the ball delivery system and a cordless drill to drill around 200 holes to screw the walls of the labyrinth to the board, it was all made with hand tools.

This labyrinth game is for two players and you need a good dose of coordination and concentration to successfully navigate the maze. You also need to communicate with your partner as neither player can see all the holes from where they stand. The only rule is that you cannot tilt the game in any direction more than 45 degrees.

I designed the labyrinth route in Sketchup and used it as a guide to measure and cut all the pieces which are made from pine. They are joined at the corners with hand-cut box joints and a few halving joints for good measure.

I added a turnstile to the game for a bit of variation which is made of hard maple and beech dowels.

The frame (4ft x 2ft) is made from pine joined at the corners with through dovetails. The grooves in the frame were ploughed with a Record 044. There are three levels; the top is 4mm clear perspex, the labyrinth and bottom layers are 4mm MDF.

I designed the ball delivery mechanism to convert 8mm of sping-loaded linear travel between two stops to 90 degrees rotational movement. This lifts the ball from the bottom layer after it has fallen through one of the holes and puts it back into play on the labyrinth layer. It took quite a lot of experimenting with McDonalds coffee stirrers and sewing pins before I got the linkage lengths and pivot positions worked out correctly.

Here's a quick and dirty video of me testing that the linkage lengths and pivot points will move the bucket that will hold the ball bearing through 90 degrees.

Here's a video showing how this translated into the actual mechanism (the cover has been removed).

The ball delivery mechanism is made from hard maple with a sapele knob operated by the player's thumb. There are two fixed pivot points and three moving pivot points, one of which has a slightly elongated hole as it connects a link moving in an arc with a link moving in a straight line.

This project was never meant to be 'fine woodworking', but it was great fun to make and quite challenging to design.

Thanks for looking!