This pull toy was made in a class called "Reinventing the Wheel." Our assignment was to build a children's pull toy that followed all child safety requirements. I thought that a chicken that can lay eggs would make a really cute pull toy with a lot of character so I designed a simple mechanism inside of a wooden chicken to release wooden spheres as the chicken is pulled along. 

The length of the string and the size of the wooden spheres avoid any choking hazard. There are no small or easily breakable parts and the wood is finished with salad bowl wax. I built a simple mechanism inside that allows the chicken to lay eggs as it rolls along. 

Process

I didn’t worry too much about safety or accuracy for the prototype. I just cut some shapes out of thin plywood on the band saw (after a failed laser cutting attempt) and then glued them together.

While not the cleanest job, the mechanism worked and it didn’t require any screws or small parts so the toy can be safe for kids.

There were a few major flaws in the prototype. The first was that it ran on two wheels which meant that unless I weighted them, my chicken would face plant. The second was that the eggs dropped out really quickly since there were four slots in the inner wheel, and the third was that the spheres were small enough to be a chocking hazard.

The entire toy needed to be scaled up to accommodate larger spheres, I designed the inner wheel to have only one slot so that the eggs would drop out slower, and I added a wheel to the front.   

While this wheel would balance the chicken I wasn’t crazy about how another wheel looked in the design. I wanted it to add the toy and not detract, so I added some baby chicks walking with their mother.

I used 3/4” plywood and cut out my parts on the CNC. I added some 1/8” between the wheels to leave space for an O ring to add some friction to the wheels. 

The order of operations was pretty complicated. It took a few tries to get it right which is not so easy when your wheels are so tightly fixed to the axel.

I had left a space between the baby chicks for a third wheel in front which kept hitting the body and slowing down the movement so I had to remove it. If I had designed the body to accommodate  that wheel it would have been fine but I didn’t have the time to start from scratch and it didn’t make a difference in the function of the toy. 

The structure finally came together and was ready to be oiled, waxed and painted. I read about safe paints and waxes and decided on a Martha Stewart wood paintand oil and wax that are used for cutting boards. They are all natural and smell really nice.

Once my chickens were painted they just needed a pull string.

I drilled through the back of the head to the mouth using a bigger drill bit in the back and used a wire to pull the string through. I knotted the end and it sat in the bigger hole. I thought I would need some adhesive but that string is so tight it’s not going anywhere.

I had hoped to add little leather feet to the chicks so that they would slap the ground as the toy was pulled and animate the chickens but the adhesives that would work were not kid safe and I had to create slots in the wheels beforehand for them to stick really well. That is definitely something I would include in another iteration of this toy.

Now all that was left to be done was make to a silly video of my toy chicken laying eggs.