Enumero State of the Union 2009

Since it’s nearing the end of the year and not likely I will sell any more boards between now and Jan 1st, I’ll jump ahead a little bit and give my EnumeroCribbageboards.com State of the Union, for 2009.

Money vs. the Cribbage Board

If a board sells at a given price, then that’s probably a fair selling price. Admittedly, I did some price fishing this year – trying to find out the right prices for a given board. I marked a few boards a little high than I would normally and then dropped the prices till they sold, thus establishing a fair selling price. Etsy.com was a huge help in that regard – since if a board sells on etsy.com, then it seems to be fairly representative of its market value, given that etsy.com is kind of a perfect place to figure out a proper selling price, albeit it’s a little trial and error. Setting a price for a board is something I’ve struggled with – until this year.

I sell boards that are distinctive and unique in their appearance and construction. My boards include solid stable wood cores (prevents warping), double edge borders, inlay galore, custom hardwood threaded caps for the peg storage compartments and are typically use made from 5 to 8 different species of woods and 8 to 29 distinct pieces of wood. And I don’t charge and an arm and a leg either.


Going…going…gone green

I think it’s fair to say that my cribbage boards are fairly “green” in the way I make them. I use recycled substrate material (the wood that makes up the core or center of the board), whenever possible. For smaller boards, this is typically cabinet grade plywood and for the larger boards, it can be recycled maple cutting board or the table top from a solid white oak table. It’s actually quite astonishing (even to me) how little wood I need to make a very nice looking board. The power to generate my power tools is provided (in part) from a large 19 panel array of Solar Photovoltaic (energy producing) panels on our roof. The shavings from planning the wood for the boards either ends up the garden or in the back of my wife’s horse trailer. I collect most of the sawdust generated and it goes into the Compost Tumbler. My glue spreaders are small left-over rectangular wood pieces. The card board boxes I use to ship the boards are either recycled (saved from the landfill at my regular paying job) or provided to me (at no cost) via the USPS who makes their shipping boxes from Post Consumer Waste. I rarely ever make one board at a time. There are always made in small batches. When I finish the boards, I typically try and do them about 10 or 12 at a time. This cuts down on waste as well. I light my shop with Compact Fluorescent bulbs. And for fresh air, a nice cross breeze and natural light, I simply open the garage door.

The sand paper wrap on my big drum sander is used over and over again – I “clean” it with what is essentially a giant eraser. I do this until there is basically no “grit” left on the sandpaper wrap.

Going forward, any board made with a least one piece of recycled material, will have a stamp on the bottom of the board. The presence of the stamp will indicate some piece(s) that make up the board came from some kind of recycled or re-purposed material.

Etsy.com is “Your place to buy & sell all things handmade ™ ” Part I

I mentioned etsy.com earlier. If you go to etsy.com and search for things made of wood (under woodworking) you will come back with about 1600 pages. Since each pages hold 20+ items, that’s about 32,000 items just under the woodworking section. Such a large and vast selection is great if you’re a consumer. Competition, especially in the world of hand-crafted items really makes for good buys! You can get amazing prices on some very, very beautiful, handcrafted items. etsy.com has, dare I say it, has become successful for both the consumer and seller and etsy.com is still WAY cheaper than ebay.com for sellers, which still gets about 20% of the item’s final selling price (when listed with auction style), when you factor in listing fees, final valuation fees and Paypal’s fees.

Getting Through Customs and Random Thoughts About Wood

I did 2 custom board requests this year. The 2nd custom board request included Ipe (aka ironwood, or as I like to call it, “Concrete in wood form”. After finishing the boards, I was reminded that Ipe is actually quite nice to work with and finishes nicely as well. Of the dozen or so wood species I routinely work with, Ipe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipe ) is a very consistent wood. The only downside is that it’s dust is pretty toxic and it’s splinter are razor sharp. Purpleheart/Paduak/Ebony can be brittle and a little finicky, but always finish well and really make the boards “pop”. Cherry is seductive in its color and grain and really is “God’s Gift to Cabinetmakers”. Mahogany always forgives but can be a little inconsistent in its grain patterns. Walnut varies from dark brown to creamy white, but its grain and appearance are always warm and inviting. Maple puts up very little fuss and seems to want to please. Poplar is like working with an old friend who knows all of your bad habits and quirks and never, ever judges. It just works. Striped Canary wood is just plain beautiful and very, very sexy. Zebra wood can be a little disappointing, but still a very pretty and interesting wood. Incense cedar is a bit brittle, but smells great and is quite beautiful and always finishes nicely. Pine/Fir, is just good old predictable pine, tried and true. And finally, Cocobolo is like a secret, exotic mistress. Expensive, dangerous, fussy as hell, and worth every penny. Just remember to take a shower after working with it! The dust always gives me the itchies!


Pegging Along…

I stopped using Miller pegs for the 3/16” hole cribbage boards. I found a very nice vendor on ebay.com who sells 3/16” polished metal pegs and so I bought a bunch of the 3/16” pegs (about 20-25 boards worth). I really like using metal pegs whenever possible. They contrast nicely with wood and more importantly, they won’t break off and create one of those “forever-plugged” holes in your cribbage board.

Alignment is Important

Believe or not, I actually worry about peg hole alignment. A lot. I was reminded of this fact when going through some of my dad’s personal possessions after he passed away this last summer. I found an older Drueke Cribbage board (in its original box). I opened the box and to my astonishment, I saw the hole alignment on this board wandered all over the place. It obviously had not been drilled with any kind of drill template. The holes were just too far off. It’s surprisingly difficult to free hand drill in a straight line. It can be done, but it’s not that easy. And if you think about it, holes have to align straight to adjacent holes on either side (say for example in 3 player board) and straight to holes in its own street. Then the grouping of the holes has to align with other groupings, in both the X and Y direction. And lets not forget the turns and making sure the holes the curve, whether 180 degrees or 90 degrees or 45 degrees, line up correctly. See, I told you I worry a lot about peg hole alignment.

ACC Tournament Style Boards

Earlier this year I got a chance to see what type of board is used by serious Peggers at Grass Roots Games and at ACC Tournaments. It was a thin board (about 2” wide) and about 19” long and had directional arrows that indicated the turn since these were continuous track boards. I even figured out how to ink “turn arrows” onto the boards. These boards were sold via the ACC newsletter for years by a gentleman named Roy Boyles. As I understand it, Roy stopped selling the boards.

I made a template from Roy’s board and then returned the board, the template etc. back to the board’s owner. The board’s owner (a friend of Roy Boyles) had made a custom request for the template. I of course made several templates for myself. I ended up making 3 different templates in the vein of the ACC tournament style board. A long and short version of with 1/8” holes and then a long version with 9/64” holes.

Since I have a lot of odd and end pieces of beech flooring around, I will go ahead and try something new in the new year and make some ACC Tournament style boards with the beech flooring. Simple, clean little boards either with 1/8” or 9/64” holes. And since there is now a Lumber Liquidator’s near my house, I may pop over there and see if they have any scrap pieces they want to sell for cheap.


Some Words about Drill Templates…

I stopped selling templates in early November. My inbox, which used to be all ablaze with template orders, has cooled considerably. For the most part, I’m kind of glad to take a break from doing templates. Templates grew a head of it’s own and quickly took over – consuming what little free shop time I have. I honesty think cribbage drill templates is one of those few areas (for selling stuff on the Internet) that has not been properly exploited, even by Amazon.com.

To Finish Up…

I like consistency and predictability when it comes to finishing boards. Most woodworkers will tell you that finishing is something they struggle with. I am no exception. My finishing technique(s) over the last year are a step closer to where I would like them to be. I’m more consistent and the results are more predictable. Both are good things since the finish is the finish.

And the final count was…

As of this writing, I have I sold out 9 series in 2009, and 49 boards. Less than 2008, but my hit counts started going up – possibly because I started to get a high ranking in the search engines? Both of the custom board requests I did this year were from people who saw the boards on etsy.com. So averaging the last 3 years, it’s safe to say that I sell about 50 boards a year.


etsy.com Part II

esty.com is a good place to sell crib boards since there are boards from different vendors to compare to one other right there in the same location, on the same web page and it’s this comparison shopping that I think people enjoy.

People coming to etsy.com expect to find hand made cribbage boards that are perhaps different looking and are made with different materials than commercially available boards. Whereas the typical visitor at my website, is generally referred there one of two ways – either by a search engine (google makes most of the referrals) or by the ACC Website (www.cribbage.org/links) and the Cribbage Corner website ( http://cribbagecorner.com/cribbage-boards ).

Fake 200th Board, Real 200th Board and the 300th Board Sold

I probably jumped the gun a little bit, awarding the 200th board sold schwag to the 188th cribbage board sold (I was counting chess boards in the overall board count). So…to alleviate my guilt, I gave some schwag to the buyer of the 200th Cribbage board (212th board overall). This person also happened to make the largest single purchase of Crib Boards to date (4 boards in one order). So…it felt like the right thing to do. Going forward, I think I will keep the board counts separate. So when I roll around to the 300th board sold (tentatively scheduled for the Holiday Season 2011 if past sales are any indication of future sales – averaging 50 boards per year sold over the last 4 years or so), it will be the actual 300th cribbage board sold and the number “300” engraved on the wood cap would confirm this.

My first paid Advertising Link

Quite out of the blue, a gentleman asked to advertise on the home page with a small text link to an online gambling site. Cribbage is often played for money (in England it’s one of the few games allowed by Statute to be played for small stakes), so I said why not?

Ironically, the very question of whether cribbage is gambling is not (similar in some interpretations to lotteries) is addressed here:

http://home.mountaincable.net/~halscrib/cutlucky.htm

200th Board Sold/Schwag Alert Update

Much to my surprise, the 200th board kind of zoomed by. The 200th board sold on Dec. 2nd and then a couple hours later, the 201st board and the next morning gave way to the 202nd board. Thank-you etsy.com! I woman in Illinois bought the 200th board, “Drytown” in the “Ghost Towns of California – Series III “ group. For her efforts in helping me reach this notable milestone, she receives valuable Enumero Schwag valued at over $5.00. The Schwag includes Enumero Themed stuff: a hat, T-Shirt, Pen, Limited Edition Refrigerator Magnets, key-chain and something that is actually useful, but arguably a little overkill for the “rustic” style board she chose: A set of 6 jeweled Austrian Style Cribbage Pegs. Every 100th board receives a set. So start counting now for Number 300!

And then there were none

I think the series, “The Committee of 5” set some kind of personal best in how quickly it sold out. A mere 10 days after the series was issued, it was sold out. The series started as a custom board request based on another board in the series, “Fictional Elements of the Universe.” Essentially, the requestor liked the maple face (stained red) with Ipe/cherry border and purpleheart & ebony point separators from a board in that series. The requestor ended up buying 2 of the 5 boards. The other 3 boards sold on etsy.com.

From this, I can draw several conclusions. People prefer 3 player boards. I already knew this, but it’s nice to have confirmation of it. I will of course be trending more towards 3 Player boards in the future, since this sells well. This particular design/combination of woods seems to appeal to people. These boards come with the heavier stout pegs, which I think people also like.

Cyber Monday

The infamous Internet shopping day, saw 3 boards sell on the particular day and reasonably high number of visitors. Not quite WalMart selling flat screen TVs for $99 but I’ll take it.

Oh Canada

After deciding not to sell boards to our Cribbage Playing friends to the North, I relinquished and updated all of the shipping rates on etsy.com to include our Cribbage playing friends to the North. International Priority mail is expensive and in some cases, the board costs less than the shipping…hence why it’s better to buy more than one board, if you happen to hail from up that way.