Winter Break Camp: The Nutcracker

Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker features a beautiful suite and large swathes of improvisation for dancers...

...but it's conspicuously short on actual nut-cracking. To remedy this, we spent Tuesday building actual, literal nutcrackers, and using them to crack nuts.*

We challenged ourselves to build a Tele-Nutcracker--a device that could crack a nut placed 10 feet from the human operator...

...and a device that could crack at least 3 nuts with one operation...

...and a fun game to roll nuts down a miniature ski-slalom on a single axle.

We also found some time to built miniature vices for at-home nut-cracking.

Delicious! 

You can find more photos here.

*In a Tinkering School first, of 19 kiddos and 5 collaborators, we only had one nut allergy--a mild one, limited to cashews. Hooray!