Drilling My Own...and Attack of the Clones

A typical crib board can have anywhere from around 125 holes to 500 holes, depending on the board size, number of players, track pattern etc. Oddly enough, I have never thought of drilling as tedious or time consuming part of making crib boards. I can drill a smaller board in around 5 minutes (yes I'm bragging), a larger board in under 15 minutes. The point of this post is not to highlight my drill press prowess, but to note a recent change necessitated by a customer request. A very nice woman emailed me and asked for a 4 - Track board for her husband for her anniversary. Not a problem I thought, since I have a 4 Track template at home. Turns out the only 4 track template I have is for the big boards (i.e. The Drive-Thru Tree Series). Oops. I don't have any smaller 4 track templates. But I do have a crib board template maker template. The gentleman who sold crib board templates on Ebay back in 2003/04, sold this funny looking template with holes in different configurations: curves, straight-away sections, etc. I bought one thinking that I could make any template I wanted, if I ever needed to. I put it in the Crib template drawer and forgot about until I received the request for the 4 track board. Here was big chance to drill my own crib board template - except mine would be drilled in 1/8" inch plastic instead of steel. (( For the record, I only know of 3 places you can buy cribbage templates online and place sell a different kind of template: Rockler (plastic), Lee Valley (paper) and iasco-tesco (steel). Also any reasonable machine shop could also make steel templates for you out of 10 gauge steel. )) So after a little rough layout to make sure I would get all the holes on the size of plastic I was using, off I went. It took a couple of hours since I was taking my time and trying to be careful, but sure enough, when it was done I had drilled my own template. This new found confidence in template making will also allow me to clone my existing steel templates into plastic. I'd tried cloning templates before, but I think the plastic I used wasn't thick enough. 1/8" plastic seems to be about the right thickness.