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This has been sitting on the bookshelf in my parents' house since I was a kid, and to this day, I still have no idea what it is or how to play:

enter image description here

It was given to us by my grandma, and the best my dad can remember is that "it's a puzzle of some sort". He claims to have solved it once, but can't recall anything beyond that.

I tried Googling "Ol' George's Nail Wail" to no avail. Here are a couple more pics from other angles:

enter image description here

enter image description here

Emmett
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  • Are the nails all the same length and just the holes are different depths? I could see a puzzle like this using different length nails combined with different depth holes and the end goal is to get all the nails in neatly like in your picture. – Andy Tinkham May 25 '14 at 15:20
  • @AndyTinkham Good guess, but I just checked, and all the nails are the same length. – Emmett May 25 '14 at 20:13

2 Answers2

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It looks like a "nail balance" puzzle. It is very similar to some of the results of this Google Image Search.

ire_and_curses
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newyorkpizza
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    That's it!! Thanks a ton. And now, here is Ol' George's Nail Wail, SOLVED: http://i.stack.imgur.com/yckYe.jpg – Emmett May 26 '14 at 04:45
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I just purchased one of these from an antique store yesterday. It's a puzzle called nail balance. You can Google nail balance and find out how to do the puzzle. Included is a picture of the solution.

enter image description here

Benjamin Cosman
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user19152
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