EnumeroCribbageboards.com State of the Union for 2010

State of the States Sold In

I’m up to 41 states sold. I’m still missing these 9 states: Arkansas, Delaware, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Okalahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming.

A Quick Note about NotableWoods.com

I sold a couple of old band saw blades to Bruce over at www.Notablewoods.com via Ebay. This is notable for a couple of reasons. It’s from his website, I got the idea to dump the stock motor on my Hitachi Resaw BandSaw and replace it with a REAL motor. I put a 5 HP Baldor motor on my Hitachi and I blogged about how I did it, how much cost, how to calculate the right pulley size to get the stock blade RPM, etc.

Anyway…Bruce is quite knowledgeable about the bands for the Hitachi Bandsaw, unlike me. I thought the bands were OK and could be sharpened and used again. Turns out, they weren’t. So upon hearing this, I gladly gave him his money back. Bruce genuinely appreciated this and sent several beautiful pieces of Koa cut-offs my way. Notablewoods.com sells beautiful Koa (and other species of wood) to Luthiers all over the world. They also sell their cut-offs (small pieces) at very reasonable prices. I in turn made the “Variation on Theme – Series I” out of the pieces he sent over and sent him a complimentary crib board.

The boards sold well, so I contacted Bruce in November of this year. He provided a Box-of-Koa (shipped in band saw blade box of course). It’s a nice selection of Koa shorts/cutoffs that for Luthiers, might be too short/small. But just like the third bowl of Porridge in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it’s just right for cribbage boards. I got a beautiful box of 25+pieces in various sizes and have delineated them for 4 new series (about 28 or 29 boards): Variation on a Theme Series II, III & IV and Famous Literary Rejects II (cutoffs).

An Annual Tradition I would like to Avoid – Double Booking

As it crept ever closer to the 2010 Holiday season, sales picked up, which is a good thing. The bad thing was I thought I’d repeated a mistake I’d made the year before. I thought I’d sold a board off the website and neglected to pull the board off of etsy.com. Fortunately I didn’t and the customer was very cool about a flurry of confusing emails I sent to her, and she got her board.

Money vs. the Cribbage Board

I sold a board for $1 in 2010. Such a deal! The great “secret” to my pricing structure is really quite simple. The more I like the way a board turned out, the more I charge for it. That’s not to say I don’t like the $1 board. I do. I like all my boards. But, for whatever reason, not every board turns out as well as I would like. Some boards simply turn out better than others. A $5.00 board is board that might have a mis-aligned drill pattern
http://www.enumerocribbageboards.com/images/guttenberg.JPG or maybe I drilled it freehand and the alignment of the holes if off a little bit: (http://www.enumerocribbageboards.com/images/resonator.JPG)

When I first started selling Crib Boards, I would sell my cheapest boards for $1.00 on ebay (http://www.enumerocribbageboards.com/images/apollo16.jpg) or (http://www.enumerocribbageboards.com/images/ChoOyu.jpg).

A lot of the boards are now ranging between $15-31 per board. The slightly nicer ones creep into the $40 area and the REALLY nice ones are in the $50-$60 range. I sold one board for $121 a couple years back. My highest board purchase to date. I suspect it will be a while before I venture back into that price range for a board. (http://www.enumerocribbageboards.com/images/siarnaq.jpg)

This board is REALLY significant (too me) since its 5 strips of ¼ sawn Cocobolo that are all perfectly book-matched and aligned. It’s tough to get 3 bookmatched strips to align, let alone 5! It’s the first board I got the idea of using ¼ sawn strips to design board faces. It’s the first board I did with Cocobolo. It’s THE board that kind of opened the flood-gates in terms of creating boards with unique and unusual grain patterns. It’s a board I created when I didn’t really know what I was doing and somehow got really lucky on my first try. And good luck inspires us to continue on. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a very good picture – but it still sold during Xmas 2008.

To that end, I’ve come up with a new 4 Tier pricing structure that rates the boards from 3 to 0, 0 being the best. Then the 4 tiers are broken down a little bit more depending on if the board is a Tournament Style, 2,3 or 4 Player board or a Giant Board (the 3 foot long board). Since any given board takes about 2 ½ to 3 hours from start to finish, I decided not to base my prices simply on how long a board takes to make – since they all take about the same amount of time. Instead, prices will vary based on the final appearance of the board and the type(s) of wood that make up the board.

The Custom Board Jinx

I’ve done a few custom boards, but I probably won’t do any more. They’re not really for me. I know of a few board makers that do custom work and have referred people who have asked about custom boards to them. Lots of folks on the Web make custom crib boards, but I can’t seem to get my head around it. At the end of the day, I can only approximate what a given customer wants and handmade objects are undervalued enough without adding an additional parameter (such as customization) into the mix.

Earlier this year, a customer made a custom request and asked me to repeat an earlier design. I made 4 boards in the design and the boards just didn’t come out very good. I declared all 4 of them “Postpono” and sold them for almost nothing. Naturally, the person who requested the board didn’t buy any of the 4 boards – I couldn’t blame him. He didn’t get what he requested and I couldn’t see redoing a 4 board series completely from scratch for the possible chance of selling one board from that series for the whopping sum of $24.

In my world, wood always dictates the final product. Least with boards that are complete and offered for sale, the customer chooses either to buy a board, because they like it or not to buy a board, because they don’t. Most people fall in the latter category. Most people are window shoppers.


As a Percentage…

My favorite place to sell crib boards, etsy.com, started offering coupons right before Cyber Monday! Yeah! I went ahead and offered a 31% off coupon (any board on the etsy.com site) and sure enough, people started using it. I’m actually pretty happy that I can do this now. I’ve been amassing a large collection of email addresses (from my 600+ template/boards sales over the last 5 years) and have wanted to start email marketing past clients – but I didn’t want to SPAM people just for the sake of sending them SPAM – I wanted to send them something they might actually find useful – like a DISCOUNT coupon for a future purchase.

I’ve played around with coupons on paypal, and it’s kind of doable, but it’s not very elegant and difficult to implement. It’s much easier on etsy.com.

CafePress.com

Custom made, short-run hats and T-shirts available over the Internet seems like a good idea, but seriously, it’s not. I am of course bitter because I’ve had items on cafepress.com for 2 years and have made exactly no money. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

On the off chance you wander over to it in search of an Enumero Bike themed bike Messenger bag, thong underwear or even a T-shirt, here is the address:

http://www.cafepress.com/enumerocribbage

It’s a Holiday…

I sold at least on board on the following Holidays this year.

Xmas (2009)
New Year’s Eve (2009)
New Year’s Day (2010)
Valentine’s Day (2010)
Turkey Day (2010)
CyberMonday (2010)
New Year’s Eve (2010)

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

Etsy.com still seems to be a great place to sell boards. As always, it’s a great place for the consumer/buyer since the immense amount of competition on the site can only drive places one direction (down) and the selection is equally immense.

Unlike flea-bay (ebay.com), etsy doesn’t gouge you on fees and your 20 cent insertion fee is good for 6 months! Their fees are reasonable and fair, not excessive. There are many things I like about etsy.com. The website is very nicely laid out, it’s easy to navigate and easy to post items to. If you want to promote your items on their site, you can easily do this for a small fee. In my experience, the buyers “get it” and respect the fact that the items they’re buying are hand made and not churned out by the thousands in some factory somewhere.

Pegging Along…

In order to make better use of my less expensive pegs on 3 and 4 player boards, I’ve taken to painting the pegs copper and black with some success. The trick is to spray on as little paint as possible, otherwise it flakes off too easily.

Recycling

I’ve had ½ dozen chess boards not quite done for some time. One chess board was hastily completed and given to a customer as a replacement chess board. The board they bought from me a couple of years earlier (one of my early chess boards, had warped rather seriously). Yes, I do honor my lifetime warranty. So that leaves 5 chess board to still be finished. Of those 5 chess boards, 2 of the boards had some issues – they also warped – so I re-glued them to a stable substrate. When I first started doing chess boards a couple of years ago, I thought I could do them in solid hardwoods, but I’ve since decided to make chess boards the same way I do crib boards: re-saw the material, glue the material to a stable substrate and then add edge layers, thus preventing any chance of warping. The old woodworker’s adage still applies: Wood Moves.

Even after re-gluing the 2 warped chess boards to a stable substrate, the 2 boards still had issues. Since both boards were Maple & Purpleheart squares, I thought, Ah-ha. I can make one good chess board from the 2 slightly screwed up chessboards. Well that idea didn’t pan out. So there I am staring at all these various parts of 2 cut up chess boards…trying to decide what to do…and the obvious solution didn’t really come to me right away. It took me a minute to realize that the random assortment of glued up squares would actually make interesting looking crib boards!

Which then got me thinking about my box of board rejects – boards I couldn’t sell even for $1, but hated to throw away. Perfect for re-purposing to another board. So I went to my freshly arrived box of Koa pieces and voila – in a matter of a few minutes, I re-purposed 8 dead boards – giving them a 2nd chance. In most cases the board face was the problem – the board bottom and substrate were perfectly usable.


Some Words about Drill Templates…Rants & All!

I finally ran out of the longer pieces of plastic and since I won’t pay full retail for plastic, I’ve been making do with what I’ve got. In other words, I’m not currently selling any templates requiring plastic over about 15” long. This eliminates quite a few templates, many of which sell well.

I tried to mitigate this problem by buying what I thought was the good, high grade chemcast (paper backed) plastic from the folks at http://www.freckleface.com. Unfortunately, the folks there are terriblely rude and just plain nasty/awful people to deal with. Don’t let the as asinine picture of the stupid Freckle Face kid on the web site fool you. These people are DICKS! And on top of that, they’re dishonest. And the owner of the company, with whom I corresponded directly with, is pretty much a royal DICK! Just my opinion, but I would never deal with them again. They charge top dollar for SHIT quality plastic (the lowest grade of plastic available). And when I pointed this out to them, let’s just say, the email correspondence between them and I went from PG-13 to down right nasty! A Better Business Bureau complaint produced nothing, further confirming my suspicion that the BBB is an equally worthless entity as these people are. Every single complaint I’ve ever filed with the BBB has gone absolutely nowhere and produced no tangible results.

So to mitigate my supply chain issues (aka the Scrap Bin at my local Tap Plastics), I came up with the idea of the NFS template. I quasi gave up Tap Plastics in Dublin. They started charging way to much for their chemcast pieces. They want $8 or $10 for little cast off pieces.

The NFS Template is a shortened version of the full size template. NFS is short for “Not Full Size”. The idea is that you don’t need full size templates – it’s really only a convenience. The only part of the template that is shortened are the straight streets in the middle of the template. If you have the turns and the corresponding streets to align from, then you can easily drill a full size board with an NFS style template. The only drawback is that you have to “pick up” the template and remount it. But the NFS templates are drilled in such a way you have to do this once. So you drill half the board, then pick up the template, remount it aligning it to the existing streets you’ve just drilled and then drill the other half. The secondary advantage to NFS templates is that people can’t use them for full size 120 point cribbage boards! The NFS template approach is similar to the “mirror” template approach, where you drill half the board + the registration holes for the 2nd half, and then flip the template, align it to the registration holes and drill the other half.

A quick check revealed that www.cribbageboardtemplate(s).com is still parked but not used. At last check, you cannot purchase templates off of this website. You can however, purchase the website (minimum bid is $100) if you choose to get into the highly lucrative cribbage board template market. Yeah…good luck with that!

A couple of URL derivatives that seem to still be up for grabs (in other words, no one has registered them yet):

http://www.cribboardtemplate.com/
http://www.cribbagetemplate.com/
http://www.cribbagedrilltemplate.com/

And of course my personal favorite…

http://www.its-a-cribbage-drill-template-dammit-and-not-a-plastic-cribbage-board-and-besides-plastic-crib-boards-are-ugly-lack-depth-and-warmth-unlike-wood.com/

The bottom line is that template sells were down quite a bit this year. It’s to be expected that template sells would taper off. As I will readily testify to, there is no money to be made making cribbage boards, so…why would there be any money in selling templates.

I clicked over the 300th template sold right before Halloween. It seemed like a good stopping point for templates made to order, thus I’ve decided to stop selling templates made to order. Rather, I’m now selling templates that are made when I drill out a given board. The obvious advantage of this is time savings. I mean it seems pretty obvious to drill a template at the same time you drill a board, but I didn’t come to this conclusion very quickly or easily. After all, I did 300 made to order templates!

So just like the crib boards, there is a picture of the actual template for sale, which would have been created at the time a board was drilled. And like crib boards, the template picture would have to be removed and the listing updated every time a given template sold.

In a perfect world of template making, I would have a $5,000+ CAD machine do the drilling for me and I would only make templates out of ¼” thick bullet proof polycarbonate plastic (the stuff that can’t crack or break and costs about $20+ sq. foot). And since this world is so perfect, I would charge $50 - $60 for these CAD made templates.


COA

I was never happy with the way I did my little Certificate of Authenticity cards. These are little Maple Veneer cards that I imprint my maker’s stamp on and on the back I write the board name and the series it belongs to. So…instead of writing the information out on the back of the card, I now print this information out on a medium grade copier paper readily available in most corporate laser printers. The advantage to this is 2 fold. One, since I have lousy handwriting, the board name and series is actually legible when it’s printed out. And the 2nd, less obvious advantage is that the paper on the back of the veneer card acts as a sort of a paper backing on the maple card veneer and stiffens up the card and prevents it from cracking or breaking after it’s been stamped with my electric maker’s stamp. These little veneer cards as so thin, I don’t think they were ever designed to have an imprint burned into them.

To Finish Up…

I continued to enhance my techniques this year. A good finish is elusive, but I’m very pleased with my results this year.

My 2nd Advertising Link

I picked up a 2nd ad link in 2010. The gentleman didn’t pay as much as the guy for the first link…but with the economy as rocky as it is, any ad revenue is appreciated! My first ad link from late 2009 renewed as well.

Schwag Alert

The template counting Odometer clicked over 300 on Oct 29th with the 4 Player Compact template. The buyer naturally received some schwag with it. I’ve loosened up my rules on giving schwag (cups, T-shirts, mouse pads, pens, tote-bag, key chains, hats, etc.). And of course, the person who buys Cribbage Board #300 will not only get some schwag, but the pretty fancy Austrian pegs, just like the folks who purchased board #100 and #200. I still get all my schwag at vistaprint.com. For example, my last order of enumerocribbageboards.com imprinted schwag consisted of the following 5 items:

1. XL T-Shirt
2. Hat
3. Custom Rubber Stamp
4. Mouse Pad
5. 25 Small Business “Fridge” Magnets

And all of it cost me a total of $7.45. All the items were “free”. The $7.45 was the cost of shipping.

Trading

I nice gentleman from the Pacific Northwest and I traded an assortment of pegs and a couple of templates for a piece of Indian Rosewood. I think he was a little surprised when I told him I would make 10 boards (10 Notable Native Americans Series) out of it. It was a blind trade on my side – I didn’t see the wood until I received it on my side. I like the wood, but I would probably not use it for board faces again. For my style of boards, Indian Rosewood would work much better an accent piece.

Coupons work very well. Who knew?

The good folks @ etsy.com started supporting coupons on their website right around Thanksgiving. They seem to work really well. I believe if you’re going to give someone a discount or coupon, at least make it worth their while. 10% coupons are lame! I opted for a meaty 31 point discount (enough for a skunk!)

Made In China

For the last few years, I’ve been buying pegs (in bulk) from woodexpressions.com. I include metal pegs and playing cards with my board as a courtesy so people can start playing on my boards right away – no need to cut up match sticks to start playing. For me, pegs are a supply expense and not something I construct from scratch and sell. Much to my surprise, I started to run really low on pegs during the Holiday Season.

I get the pegs at quasi-wholesale from woodexpressions.com which is quite a savings over retail. Not surprising, the pegs that I have gotten from them are made in China.

So I started wondering what it would take to cut out the proverbial Middle Man and just buy the pegs directly from the manufacturer in China myself. So I asked “The Google” and I found alibaba.com which is a website that connects overseas suppliers with buyers. I made few email inquiries and found I could get 10,000 pegs for a very good price, much less than what I’m paying WoodExpressions.com. Following the Henry Ford mantra of “You can get it in any color you like, as long as it’s black”, the first order of 10,000 pegs will be silver. Even with shipping factored in, I still realize a substantial cost savings. And yes, 10,000 pegs is the minimum order. So if you need silver pegs for cheap, look no further!

The 300

For some silly reason, I really wanted to hit 300 total cribbage boards sold before the end of 2010. And I did so on Dec 13th, 2010. I also picked up a new state, Utah. My basking in the glow of this personal milestone didn’t last long and about 20 hours later, board # 301 sold. You got to love the Holiday Shopping Season!

And the final count was…

I have I sold out 17 series in and 99 boards in 2010. A nice increase from 2009, largely due to etsy.com. Comparing page views from etsy.com to page views to my website, they definitely seem comparable. If anything, my website is slightly more in terms of page views. The bottom line is that page views on etsy.com translate to actual sales – not so much on my website. I think folks inherently trust a product hosting site like etsy.com (or ebay.com), over an individual’s website. Also, I think etsy.com has really grown and people recognize it as the place to go when looking for something vintage or hand-crafted, especially during the Holiday Shopping Season.

For 2011…

Tropical Exotic Hardwoods of Latin America have provided me with quite a bit of material to some nice single piece Cocobolo tournament size boards. As always, Cocobolo ain’t cheap, but it is sure pretty!

I had very good success with another vendor on ebay, Chitswood. I really dig the smaller thinner pieces he sells, perfect for travel size boards. I did the Comedic Teams IV – Monty Python series using his wood as well. That turned out to be a very popular (sold out relatively quickly) series as well. I hope he starts selling wood again!

The Koa boards should do quite well as well.

And as usual, I have a large collection of boards on the shelf that have been drilled, they just need to be finished. So I will be throwing those into the mix as well

Changes for 2011

I finally got all the states and appropriate shipping rates entered into my paypal account, so I can do location based shipping costs (assuming someone buys

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.

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.

New 3/16" Pegs Arrived and I couldn't be happier

The New 3/16" Cribbage Pegs Arrived and I couldn't be happier! The colors are a good fit for the boards (black, copper, gold, light and dark silver color) and they fit very nicely. This series is titled "The Six Cardinal Directions" and includes North, South, East, West, Up and Down. Technically up and down aren't cardinal directions, but...I made 6 boards, so I had to make them fit. The substrate for these boards (the board in the middle that the top, sided and bottom is glued to) is made up of solid white oak slats and is hard as nails! I found this out the hard way when I went to drill the peg holder hole. Usually I will drill the hole about half way on the horizontal borer and then finish the rest of the hole with a hand drill. I started to do this - I started the hole on the horizontal borer and then I switched to the hand drill. I started to drill and the hand drill bit seized up because the wood it was drilling into was so DAMN hard. Unfortunately, just because the drill bit suddenly stopped turning, this doesn't mean that the drill will stop along with it. The drill itself kept turning and nearly took my hands off. Ouch! Tapping the hole for the threaded cap was no picnic either! But, in the end, I'm pleased with the way the boards turned out and I think they look especially spiffy with the new metal pegs!