Rattles!

One fun woodturning project I have been doing on and off over the last couple of years is creating wooden rattles as gifts for friends and family with new babies. All of the rattles are finished with food safe finish made out of local beeswax and food grade mineral oil.

I have been creating two different types of rattles, solid rattles filled with beans to get the rattling, and captive ring rattles.

Captive Ring Rattles

Captive ring rattles are a tricky but satisfying piece that involves cutting individual rings from a single piece of wood. The rings can then shake up and down the inner shaft, and make a great noise. I created a couple different tools to create the rings, each one was made out of an existing tool and ground out to try to make it easy to shape the rings.

Filled Rattles

The filled rattles involve first building out a blank with a hollow space that contains the rattle bits, then turning that on the lathe. The hollow space is created by gluing different layers of wood together into a rectangular blank. With these blanks you can mess with combining different species of wood to create nice contrasts and patterns.

I’ve tried a variety of different materials to fill the rattles with, and found that metal nuts produce the best sound, but since those aren't food safe the second best sound has been pinto beans. Since these are being given to children I was worried about them being easily broken, so I tested the first couple by throwing them across the garage onto concrete, and throwing them around the house at different surfaces. None of theme broke so I figured they are safe enough for giving out.