Hole #3 - Trapped

You start the hole by putting up a ramp, attempting to get your ball into a cup that will swing over and deposit your ball onto a staircase with crooked steps.  However, to get to the cup, you have to navigate through a rotating "mobile" that has pictures of the mouse logo and cheese slice from the Mousetrap game on plastic cards.  An ill-timed putt could slam into one of these "blockers" and roll back to your feet.  A stray putt that misses the cup will either roll back or go off the ramp completely.  Any of these failures will require you to putt again from the tee until you get it in the cup.

Once in the cup, the ball's weight will cause the cup to flip over 180 degrees and dump the ball onto the staircase.  The ball will then meander down the stairs and into the “gutter” where it will slowly pick up speed and make a left turn towards the green.

There is a twist to this hole that requires a little bit of physical activity beyond just putting.  When you start the hole, there is a “cage” positioned over the hole such that it should block your ball from going in.  After you get the ball in the cup, you have to make your way over to the green, raise the cage and balance it on a notch halfway up the stop-sign-shaped flagstick, thus giving the ball room to go in the hole.  You have to get the cage hanging above the hole before your ball hits the green or you get a stroke penalty. This is an attempt to add a little element of the Holey Moley mini-golf show--but without anyone falling in water or getting clobbered by anything.  Also, if you get the hole-in-one and balance the cage such that it falls back down over the hole when your ball goes in, you get a special bonus (usually a free shot or "mulligan" to use anywhere the rest of the round).

Like a lot of holes, the tee shot is the critical stroke.  Once you get the ball in the cup, it generally goes in the hole about 90% of the time.  On the other hand, if you don’t get it in the cup, you just have to keep trying until you do.

Hole #3 Tee	Hole #3 - Swinging blocker to get past

Hole#3 - Cup that swings over when the ball is hit into it.

Hole#3 - The dreaded rickety stairs.

Hole Development

I wanted to create a hole that had elements of the game Mousetrap, which I thought was really cool when I was a kid.  In the game, you turn a crank that triggers a stop sign to slam into a boot that tips over a bucket that contains a metal ball.  The ball then falls down some rickety stairs into a gutter, up an elevator and through a few more things until it ultimately gets the cage to come down over a mouse. 

In this hole the ball does enter kind of a bucket, goes down rickety stairs and through a "gutter" then winds up on the green where it could trigger a trap to fall on over your ball.   Also, the flagstick is in the shape of a stop sign.  So the hole does have some Mousetrap elements.

Originally, this hole did not have the swinging blocker.  Also, there was a border that ran all the way up the right side of the ramp.  However, I thought it was too easy to get a hole-in-one as you could push your putt right and have it bounce back left into the cup, so I removed the right-hand border half way up.  It still seemed too easy so I came up with the idea of adding the spinner to potentially block shots.  Although there was nothing like this in the actual Mousetrap game, the blocker does have the pictures of the Mousetrap logo and cheese.

Although this hole is #3 on the card, it was the last hole created--and one of the more challenging ones to build.

How It Was Built

The most complex part of this hole is the "rickety staircase."  The somewhat tricky part was angling the steps so that the ball would roll from step to step without getting stuck.  I cut up an old, weathered fence board to get the rough look of the steps.  The steps are attached to side boards with corner braces.  The foundation of the staircase is actually pieces of the post from our old mailbox that I had replaced.

The actual Mousetrap game used a bucket to deliver the ball to the stairs.  I simulated the bucket with a painted Wendy's cup.  The cup is suspended between the ramp and stairs with small pieces of wood and screws that go though the sides of the cup and allow it to swing over towards the stairs when the weight of a golf ball is putted into it.  The cup has a weight stuck on top of it to give it the momentum to swing over once a ball is putted into it.  It was a bit tricky getting the right amount of weight so that the cup was light enough to allow the weight of the ball to swing the bottom of the cup downward and heavy enough to pull the cup downward and land on the stairs.  There is also a screw coming out of the stairs that stops the cup from swinging beyond 180 degrees (when it is level with the top step).

A late addition to this hole was the “blocker” that rotates above the fairway.   The blocker part is simply small wooden dowels glued into a piece of corrugated plastic with more plastic squares with pictures of the mouse and cheese attached on each end.  To give the horizontal plastic bar more stiffness I glued yet another Banzai chopstick to the back of it.  A metal landscaping anchor is stuck into the plastic bar, then the whole contraption is hung from a "wind chime spinner" I found on Amazon.  The spinner is suspended above the fairway by one of those metal bars meant to hold a garden flag (my wife had lots of these in the garage).

Incidentally, the wind chime spinners are advertised as "rain proof" in the broken-English description (likely written by someone from China) of it on Amazon.  They most definitely are not.  The first time one got rained on after I set it up (actually, this was for hole #4), it stopped working.  When I took it apart the inside was filled with water.  After I drained it and replaced the AA batteries, it started working again.  So this one is brought in at night to save it from the weather.

The "gutter" the ball enters when it exits the stairs is a piece of PVC pipe split in half the long way and joined together at a right angle with a 90-degree PVC elbow (you should have seen the guys at True Value hardware when I told them I needed a PVC elbow big enough to fit a golf ball through).  Once again, my brother helped out by cutting the pipe with his table saw.  Landscaping anchors are used to support the gutter and it leans against a couple potted plants to stabilize it.  The end of the gutter that empties onto the green is held in place by gutter strap (that would, ironically, normally be used to hold a real gutter downspout in place) that is looped over the gutter and screwed into the green--once I got the gutter lined up with the hole, I wanted to try to make sure it stayed in place

The tee and ramp boards are connected together using some old cabinet hinges that allowed the angle to be adjusted to the height of the stairs.  To smooth the slope between the tee and the ramp, a piece of corrugated plastic was placed under the carpet and stapled down.  Using the plastic to create the smooth incline was yet another of my brother's suggestions (it was his plastic, as well).  The borders are again pipe insulation.

The green is another simple one with a board lying flat and the hole sunk directly into the ground. 

This hole again uses a carpeted leftover plywood piece for the golfer to stand on when teeing off (lefties stand in the grass).