Elijah and Tyla love using those penny squishing machines at various places we visit. Elijah has built up quite a collection, but it mostly sits in a little binder in his drawer. I thought it would be fun to display them.
To hold the pennies, I settled on angled pieces of MDF with little pieces of acrylic dowels sticking out to hold the penny. I 3D printed a jig to help me hold the pieces correctly to get the holes at perfect 90 degree angles to the slope of each piece and also get them spaced correctly. I made three rows of vertical penny holders and three rows for horizontal ones.
Everything got put into a walnut box that was just thick enough to hold everything along with a sheet of acrylic over the front. The black penny holder part sets into a rabbet on the back of the frame and then some turn button fasteners keep the holder in place. For a finish I used David Picciuto’s homemade mix that is boiled linseed oil and shellac followed with a wax.
I learned a lot about how I would do it next time, but even accounting for those things, it’s still fun to have them displayed on his wall. The most frustrating part of this project was that it was probably a one-day project that I turned into about 4 months. I had so many excuses about being busy with other things that it just didn’t move along. So last week I told myself I was going to do SOMETHING to the project every day, even if it was only for 10 minutes. It wrapped up pretty quickly after that.
The glare is pretty intense since I just used acrylic. It’s hard to photograph and you definitely notice it when viewing the frame, but it’s not quite as bad as it seems from photos.
