Grandpa Ben has made toys from scrap wood for 40 years

Store toys kept breaking, so a Wyoming grandpa started making his own from scrap wood.

By Made Over Weekend · 5 min read

Ben Arthur, known to local kids as Grandpa Ben, bought toys for his grandchildren the way most of us do. The trouble was that the cheap ones often broke before the children even got home. He thought about the toys his own grandfather had made, toys that were still being played with three generations later, and decided to make some himself.

"Kids today need to have toys like I had as a kid," he told Cowboy State Daily in September 2026. That decision was about 40 years ago. What started as toys for his own children, Stephanie and her brother, became a small business called Grandpa's Toys and Creations. He and his wife Virginia later moved away from the bustle of Laramie, and today he works from a trailer he turned into a workshop in Kirby, Wyoming.

How it was built

Ben started with used commercial tools and bought more only as the toys paid for them. His favorite is an old cast iron scroll saw that came from the Medicine Bow School District. He works from patterns his uncle designed, changed over the years to suit his own style. Back in 2015 he told the Casper Star-Tribune that he traces each pattern onto the wood with carbon paper before he cuts.

The wood is mostly material other people throw away: leftovers from builders and cabinet makers, and above all recycled pallets. Pallets are built from whatever wood is cheap, so he never knows what he will find inside. Many come from eastern forests, and he has pulled oak, walnut and maple out of them. Virginia paints the finished pieces with non-toxic paint.

His first toys were trucks and cars. Then came animals, big train sets, rubber band guns and a puzzle of the Wyoming county map that he has now made hundreds of times. A large board puzzle can still take him up to six hours. He works about eight hours a day, split between morning and evening so there is time left for the garden.

What it teaches a weekend woodworker

The carbon paper trick is the part you can copy tonight. Draw or print a simple shape, a truck or a fish, lay carbon paper on a pine board and trace over it. Cut the outline with a coping saw or a jigsaw, keeping the blade just outside the line. Drill holes for wheel axles, then sand every edge and corner round, because a child will hold it. If you use pallet wood, pick clean boards and skip any that look stained or oily.

Ben's toys last because they are simple and solid. That is a good first project: one board, one pattern, one afternoon. Pick a plan this weekend and make something a kid in your life will still have in thirty years.