Monday, September 22, 2008

Templates, Window Shoppers, A Broken Drum Sander and Gluing Like Crazy

"Templates, Window Shoppers, A Broken Drum Sander and Gluing Like Crazy" is kind of a funny title, but accurately reflects the status of EnumeroCribbageBoards at the moment. I see lots of Window Shoppers (in etsy.com) and to a lesser degree on my website, my beloved drum sander is broke at the moment and I'm gluing up new cribbage boards like crazy.

Templates

Crib board template sales seemed to peak in September, maybe due to the fact people are making crib boards for the Holidays? I'm no longer using the cheaper plastic for the templates. I'm using a material called Chemcast Acrylic Plastic, either in a 1/4" or 3/8" thickness. It costs me between $11.00 to $15.00 a square foot. It's expensive, but it's really nice stuff to work with. It drills nicely and is really solid - not likely to crack or chip. My templates are still quite a bit less than other vendor's who sell plastic drill templates and the material is really thick!

Window Shoppers

Etsy.com is a pretty neat site, since it caters to people who make "stuff" and gives them another outlet to sell their wares. I like it and it's very affordable. A quick count shows I've gotten about 1100 viewings on the inventory sitting on etsy.com at the moment, but no sales in the last couple of months.

A Broken Drum Sander

My beloved 38" Woodmaster drum sander has been acting odd of late, and I finally figured out why. Two of it's 4 threaded rods used to raise and lower the feed bed, are stripped out. Needless to say, you want things to be pretty level when sanding, and stripped rods cause the feed bed to list to one side and make for very inconsistent results. The replacement parts have been ordered. I'm not looking forward to replacing those rods.

Gluing Like Crazy

The large group of boards I'm working on at the moment (100+ boards) are all mostly tournament style (long, narrow, single pass). I've glued faces to about 50 them and I am humming along on the rest. The prices on these boards will be vary from anywhere from $19 on the low end to $53 on the high end. The board faces on the $53 board will be pretty amazing looking. They're made from 2 strips of book-matched cocobolo and the grain patterns are just out of this world! These 100+ boards will be divided into 15 new series.