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.