Mike’s Learning Tower

Viewer Project - By Mike Pugh from Aldie, VA
Added on March 5, 2013

This is a Learning Tower that I built for my 2 year old son. He can climb up the side and hop onto the platform, which allows him to be at counter height so he can help prepare food or watch what we’re doing in the kitchen. He’s gotten pretty good at putting toppings on home-made pizza. The platform has 4 positions it can be in so as he grows we can adjust the height to minimize risk of him bending over the top side and flipping out.

The design is an exact copy of a commercial product. My wife’s friend let us borrow their Learning Tower for a few months while they got ready to move to a new house and didn’t have room for it. My wife and son really liked it so I took it apart and used it as a template to build my own using a tablesaw, jigsaw, bandsaw, and my router. Joinery is screws.

I finished it with clear shellac mixed with a few drops of tint to darken it a bit. For the most part, the project was completed with about 9 hours of effort – half of which was sanding up to 220 grit and then applying the shellac.

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