Granny's Tea Box Puzzle

Way back when I began puzzle making I started out using newly emptied cigar boxes and other random vintage boxes I could get on the cheap.  In that journey I found some friends.

Once I began to really get comfortable with this whole puzzle making thing I wanted to dedicate a puzzle series to my Granny (RIP) who first gave me a metal puzzle when I was young and wild.  It was likely motivated by a desire to get me to sit still for 5 minutes, to be interested in something more then Huckleberry Finn-esque shenanigans, lol.  I reckon a seed was planted.

In this series I intended to design and build 10 different puzzles that each featured a different mechanism.  So far I have built 9 of those 10.
These cute tea boxes had everything I needed for a puzzle box, and while the wood was super basic balsa, the colorful images oozed oodles of charm, it all just worked out.  Surprisingly, I was able to source these tiny souvenir tea chests online and soon was ordering a raft of them!

Sometimes the nature of the puzzle can be wrapped around its artwork.  The last puzzle had artwork depicting a sugar bush sleigh, so that is what I made the little box to look like.  So much fun!

There was a bit of work to do to the tea box before it made it to the retrofitting stage.  The boxes had stickers and glue that needed too be removed, nutritional food guide info on the bottom had to be sanded off, and the lid often would need a bit of attention to allow it to slide perfectly.  After that I could begin.

The second last in the picture sequence is called Granny's Hammer and the cool thing I wanted to see happen here was that all of the internal parts would be removeable once the box was opened. 

The last puzzle I made was called Huckleberry and is just filled with a million things going on, all blocking a main locking bolt from moving.  The tricky thing here was to make it so that it had many different solutions, so all of the mechanisms had to interact with the main bolt but it didn't matter at what point the were switched.  Yup, making 25 of these was enough, lol.

The first tea box puzzle is perhaps one of my favorites.  It is only a '1 move to open' puzzle, but surprisingly difficult.  The solution is rather simple once you know, but it is a lot of fun to ad lib a little and make it out to be more difficult than it really is.  This is the puzzle I hide the treats in, the sound of the candy wrapper around the chocolate anxiously awaiting their success only calls to them more. Maybe I am evil.  : )

Thanks for looking guys!