Welcome to The Challenge Coin Project. As you know, in addition to our woodworking network, we are also a fund raiser for The Wounded Warrior Project, and fanatical supporters of our men and women who serve The United States of America.

One of our members Ron Altier came to us and asked if he and other members could make something for our troops and send it off to The Wounded Warrior Project for them to distribute to our soldiers returning home from war. The purpose of his request was to give our members an alternative besides direct money donations. A lot of us woodworkers have a ton of wood hanging around, and he thought it would be really nice if we could make use of the wood, and with materials and time, he and others could make up something crafty to give to our troops. I ran it by JenWWP, our Wounded Warrior Project representative, and she thought of The Challenge Coin Displays. I passed this idea by Ron, and he gave me the thumbs up, so here we are, at the beginnings of what I hope will become a tradition here at The Patriot Woodworker community.

For a little history lesson on the Military Challenge Coin you can go to the Wiki definition at

Military Challenge Coin History

We came up with a design that I believe will be both simple to make, and not break the bank either. We came up with this design because with basic tools, this can be done in virtually any ones work space. If you don't have the tools I used in my "How To", you should easily be able to use an alternative as the design is simple in form.

Please visit Military Challenge Coin Display Build.  We made this tutorial to show you how our coin display is made. Go to Military Challenge Coin Display Build to see how we made this wonderfully simple yet handsome display.

For another option, I have found another plan to build a coin display, this one is similar to ours. Your welcome to use this plan as well, you can find it in our Free Plans and Drawings area under the Resources Tab at the top right of our website. It appears to be a good set of plans, it even explains how to build a carriage to carry your material through a surface planer at an angle. I got this plan from The Military Challenge Coin Blog. It is a cool blog all about challenge coins.

All the details for our challenge coin display are on our blog, but I will repeat a couple important ideas here. First:

"Keep in mind, this is only a guide to making a wonderful Challenge Coin Display for our troops. This is not the end all be all. I would like to really encourage folks to be creative, your more then welcome to come up with your own designs, and your more then welcome to use any type of wood.

As a final thought, one thing to remember, these coin displays are going to be given to our wounded troops returning from war, they are freshly wounded, laying in a strange hospital bed, with not much more then the robe they arrived with. They are probably pretty nervous, not sure of what is going on around them, some worse off then others, some badly beaten, if you can imagine the worse a soldier could go through in war with injuries, then you have a good idea what our troops are dealing with. These coin displays are going to those very same troops I speak of. We will be sending these displays to The Wounded Warrior Project, in turn they will distribute them to our wounded Warriors in the hospitals. The displays will sit by their bedside, and they will have a place to rest their coins they receive as commanding officers and officers pay them a visit and give them these coins. So, the message you write on the bottom of these displays will be read by soldiers who are just trying to figure things out. They might be having a hard time coming to terms with their injuries. And for that, it is purely an honor to have our members coin displays end up at the bedside of our fighting men and women." 

When your all done, we would like to ask you to send your display to me. As I was speaking with our Wounded Warrior Project RepresentativeJenWWP, we decided this would be the most efficient way to get these to the project, and to our troops. They will receive one box from us, and they in turn can take that one box straight to the hospital(s) and distribute the displays out of that one box, it just make sense. When your ready to send your display please PM me for the address.

If you have any questions regarding this project, feel free to PM me here at The Patriot Woodworker or you can call (951) 813-0717.

And, please take pictures of your displays and post them on our Woodworking Forum!

I would like to thank you all for making this possible, and I would like to thank our member Ron Altier for bringing this idea to the forefront. This was Ron's idea, and it's ideas like this that make our network something really special in my humble opinion. I know of no other woodworking forum that has the heart and soul that our network seems to have, thanks to our members.

John Morris

The Patriot Woodworker