hold on now I think I better step in before there's some bloodshed welcome today I thought I'd take you back a few years I built this castle kit for my son back in 2006 so this is by no means a new project built today I've been woodworking for about 20 years now but I've only been doing videos for about one year so I thought I don't know maybe once or twice a year I might take you back and show you an older project that I'd built I can't give you a build video because clearly it's already built but I can walk you through the design process tell you about how I put it together and hopefully you'll still find it interesting what I have here are a bunch of pieces that make up a kit I was thinking about construction toys like Lego when I design this the idea was that to build a bunch of individual pieces that your child can then use as building blocks to build whatever kind of castle doctor imagine let's them also as a builder you can build as many or as few of these pieces as you want and then you can build more pieces over time so this the set can grow you know if your if your kid really likes it then you want to make some more pieces or you might want to design some new pieces I have here three basic components in this kit first I have a wall segment Counsel's gonna have walls and second I have a tower unit and I'll get more into it later and finally I have here the gate which is the largest and the most complex and I'm gonna take a look at each of these in turn okay first the wall well actually first let's talk about what it's made out of I built everything out of nine millimeter Baltic birch plywood which is roughly 3/8 of an inch thick I knew that this project is going to have a lot of exposed edges and Baltic birch because it has no voids the edges actually can look really nice when it's finished cheap plywood is all can often look awful when they have exposed edges for a finish I used tried-and-true original wood finish which is just a mixture of boiled linseed oil and beeswax it gives a slight amber color to it and I really wanted the natural finish and so that's what I like you could paint this gray black you know any color you want obviously Baltic birch takes paint awesome so the notches in the tops of the walls and the tops of the towers and the tops of the gate these are called crenellations and there's a real easy way to do this basically you take your piece of Baltic birch and you turn it upside down and in fact you take several pieces stack them up together so I have like five six pieces stacked up together then you just run it over a dado blade on the table saw you make one notch move it over make another notch it doesn't take much time at all so along the top of the wall and actually I'll along the top of a lot of the pieces I have this little decorative groove this is simply you get this by just running over the table saw with the blade you know maybe 1/32 raised and you just run it along both sides and you get this nice little what makes this nice little decorative line so each wall pace I made them 9 inches long you can make them longer or shorter they're about 5 inches tall they fit into a little dado here at the end of the piece and it's just held in with glue not even nails and the one final thing is is at the end of each wall I have everything cut back at a sharp angle and that so that you can bring pieces close together like that so next the towers I've got several different sizes of towers their size so that they stack nicely which gets lots of options for castle building but another nice feature is that they nest inside each other so when you store it away it all just packs away like that I've put doors on two sides of the towers figuring that towers basically go into the corner you know you could put doors so they go through but then you'll have an extra doorway in the back of your castle finally the gate this is basically two towers with a wall in between them the design is very much size so that it looks just like all the other pieces it's got the same shadow lines with just this hair there's too to set it off a little bit if you look at the underside you can see how there's a tower is open on the inside and then the gate the front wall of the gate is just fitted in and of course there's a platform up here so that you can do things like pour boiling oil on the invading hordes these are Playmobil figurines so usually about three inches tall I bought a few assorted small kits and built the castle pieces to work with them all that really means is that they'll fit through the doorway and they can stand up here so this is what I've got in my kit I built one gate I built two four six eight towers mostly in sets I bought one little one and one tall little one and I built six wall segments that are all the same you could of course come up with something else to expand on this you could make a chapel you could make a wishing well you could make a stable all sorts of pieces once you start building that you can come up with so that's about it for this one I'd like to thank you for coming by and watching I hope you found it interesting you can see various still photos of the castle on my website if you're interested in building one of these for yourself I've put together a set of detailed plans that you can purchase that give you all the details and the dimensions and they walk you through the construction steps of how to build these yourself is only a mirage