T and T (Templates and Tournament Boards)

As I've mentioned before, template sales seem to come in waves. I won't sell any templates for a couple of weeks and then all of a sudden, I'll be drilling 10 templates that week. So seems to be the case for new template designs. This week, I received 3 requests for new template designs: a spiral, the "29" shaped board and an intriguing request to downsize the size of the Standard Tournament model by a few inches (more on why it's intriguing in a moment). Since I don't do my templates in CAD, new template designs pose a challenge - how to make new templates using existing templates. For the "29" shaped board, I can print out a picture of a "29" shaped cribbage board, enlarge it to size I want and then spray mount the picture onto piece of wood and use it as rough guide to make the template. For the spiral board, I can draw a perfect spiral with Adobe Illustrator and then paste the picture spiral picture down and drill accordingly, using the spiral line as a guide for the center hole (for a 3 player board).

The third and most intriguing request came from someone who recently bought the tournament style template, but didn't realize till he received it, that it was longer than he expected by about 3-4 inches. The gentleman was looking for a tournament board template to match the length of his existing tournament board which had been made by a gentleman named Roy Boyles. A little bit more investigation showed Roy used to sell this size of tournament board (around 19 inches long) through ads he placed in the ACC newsletter and then all proceeds from his sales were donated directly to the Lymphona Society.

So I offered to make him a template to match Roy's board (as close as I reasonably can) and he will loan me Roy's board, so I can take measurements from it.

Apparently, at ACC sanctioned tournaments, the standard tournament board used is around 19 inches long. I have never attended an ACC tournament and thus, I didn't know this. (I really should get out more). I looked around on the Internet a little bit and could not find anyone who sells 19" tournament boards. My tourney boards are typically 22-23" long. One place sold a 29" long tourney boards and yet another place sold tourney boards that are only 15" long.

Roy has stopped selling his tournament boards, but he still gets requests for them. So...this gentleman was kind enough to offer an introduction of sorts between myself and Roy, with the intent that I could possibly fill the niche left by Roy and offer for sale these size of tournament boards.

It's an exciting proposal, so we'll see.