The Fickle Hand of Fate aka My Drum Sander and The End of Cheap Plastic

The Fickle Hand of Fate aka My Drum Sander

When I come up for name for a series of boards, I have to find a collection of of related things to match the number boards. Recently, I announced a new series, "The 10 Named Space Shuttles" to match a series of 10 Cocobolo Faced Tournament Boards. There were actually 9 shuttles produced by NASA and a 10th shuttle that was a Amusement Park Ride at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois. Unfortunately, one of the 10 boards met with an unfortunate sanding accident when going through the sanding clean-up phase and it wasn't really fixable. So, my carefully crafted series of 10 boards was reduced to 9 boards. I had to eject one of the boards. I was never 100% comfortable grouping a Space Shuttle Amusement Park ride in with the real Space Shuttles so it was an easy choice. Thus the series of 9 boards, each named after an actual NASA Space Shuttle, became "NASA's 9 Shuttle/Orbiter Vehicles". The prices on the boards named after vehicles that went into outer space (not all of NASA's Space Shuttles went into space), reflect something about the Space Travel history of the board. For example, the "Challenger" board will cost $73, for the 73 seconds that Challenger flew on it's last mission before it's catastrophic and tragic failure. The "Columbia" board will sell for $48.08 (one penny for every one of it's 4808 trips around the earth). The Discovery" board will cost $52.47, honoring it's 5247 trips around the Earth thus far.

The End of Cheap Plastic

I like a bargain as much as the next person. I've been able to keep the costs of some of my bigger/longer templates cheaper due to the fact that I had a large stash of 2 foot long Polycarbonate plastic pieces that I picked up pretty inexpensively. Alas, I've almost sold out of these pieces and will have to buy longer (2 foot long) plastic pieces at full retail. The prices on the longer templates will go up a couple of dollars to reflect this.

Where the Wild Things Are

My wife keeps horses at a nearby retirement Community. And near where the horses live, this Retirement Community has a large and pretty active dumpster facility. It's not uncommon for someone who has passed this world and unto the next to have all their worldly goods taken up to the dumpsters and "dumped". It makes for some interesting treasure hunting for the locals.

My wife casually mentioned the other day that someone had thrown away a leather chair - covered in Zebra Leather. I didn't give it much thought until I went over there to help out with some maintenance chores for the horses and I saw the chair. The Zebra leather was in pretty decent shape.

I'd previously made a couple of boards with palm leave pieces, so I thought I'd give the Zebra leather a try. I was able to salvage quite a few good pieces - but like most of the boards I make, the material itself (and not me) will determine what type of board, it's size, etc.

I wouldn't normally make a board out of animal hide, but there is a lot precedence for making crib boards out of animal type material (ivory tusks, deer antlers and moose antlers - to name a few), so it's not all that far fetched. The hide fits my general criteria of being unusual or interesting, so it seemed like a good fit. On a at least of a few of the boards, I will mix the Zebra Hide face with some Zebrawood.

I would never have gone out and actively looked to make a board out of an animal hide - but since this re-purposing the hide (it would have gone to the landfill), I was OK with it.

Post Holiday Wrap Up and New Templates

I actually sold boards on and after Christmas

Admittedly, the cribbage board business can be somewhat seasonal since the majority of them are given as gifts. Given that etsy is now a strong selling avenue for me, I pretty much expected not to see another cribbage board sale until next November, so I was bit surprised I’ve actually sold a few boards since Christmas. In fact, I sold a board on Christmas day.

Templates

Now that the holidays have passed, I’m selling templates again with one notable exception: I added a disclaimer letting people know I don’t have and I don’t use CAD machinery to drill my templates. My goal has always been to sell reasonably good looking templates with out the holes wandering all over the place.

I got the idea of making really small templates, what I will call micro-templates. I cruised around the web looking for ideas of how to squeeze a 120 point continuous track format into a very small area – say 5” x 5”. I found some interesting wrap around type drill patterns (from other crib board vendors) which I shrank down by about half to fit the micro-template paradigm.

I also came up with a bunch of new designs in the geometric section: trapezoid, Compact Ovals, Heart, star, race-track, and rectangle/triangle/square with tapered corners.

I’m also adding what I call SCT templates (Spiral Cascading Turns), where the number of turns equals the number of streets.

With all the new template designs, I up to 55 template designs – the trick now is to get caught up and drill them all. So I’d be increasing my current template count from 30 templates to 55+ templates.

In addition to the little freebies I include with the plastic templates I sell, I’m now throwing in a paper template (3 person continuous track) loosely based on the paper template Lee Valley sells on their website. You tack the template to the board material, us an awl to mark the hole center and then come back and drill the hole. I include 2 copies of the template – one to use and one to share.