Attack of the Clones - Part II

Still flush with success from actually rolling my own cribbage template, I think over the next few months, I will clone all my steel templates (into plastic) and if anyone wants to buy a cloned template from me (made in plastic), I will offer those for sale at a nominal fee - maybe $10-15. About 1/2 the price of what Rockler charges for their plastic templates. I've had 2 or 3 requests from Cribbage Enthusiasts looking for crib board templates. The plastic templates won't be pretty, but they should be functional. I've noticed that the plastic templates are easier to get tighter against the board (than the steel templates) which reduces drill bit tear out (the tendency of the drill bit to pull a little bit of the wood face out with it as it exits the hole). The cool thing is I can make a batch of say4 or 5 cloned templates in one drilling session, since I can just gang them together and drill them all at once.

Drilling My Own...and Attack of the Clones

A typical crib board can have anywhere from around 125 holes to 500 holes, depending on the board size, number of players, track pattern etc. Oddly enough, I have never thought of drilling as tedious or time consuming part of making crib boards. I can drill a smaller board in around 5 minutes (yes I'm bragging), a larger board in under 15 minutes. The point of this post is not to highlight my drill press prowess, but to note a recent change necessitated by a customer request. A very nice woman emailed me and asked for a 4 - Track board for her husband for her anniversary. Not a problem I thought, since I have a 4 Track template at home. Turns out the only 4 track template I have is for the big boards (i.e. The Drive-Thru Tree Series). Oops. I don't have any smaller 4 track templates. But I do have a crib board template maker template. The gentleman who sold crib board templates on Ebay back in 2003/04, sold this funny looking template with holes in different configurations: curves, straight-away sections, etc. I bought one thinking that I could make any template I wanted, if I ever needed to. I put it in the Crib template drawer and forgot about until I received the request for the 4 track board. Here was big chance to drill my own crib board template - except mine would be drilled in 1/8" inch plastic instead of steel. (( For the record, I only know of 3 places you can buy cribbage templates online and place sell a different kind of template: Rockler (plastic), Lee Valley (paper) and iasco-tesco (steel). Also any reasonable machine shop could also make steel templates for you out of 10 gauge steel. )) So after a little rough layout to make sure I would get all the holes on the size of plastic I was using, off I went. It took a couple of hours since I was taking my time and trying to be careful, but sure enough, when it was done I had drilled my own template. This new found confidence in template making will also allow me to clone my existing steel templates into plastic. I'd tried cloning templates before, but I think the plastic I used wasn't thick enough. 1/8" plastic seems to be about the right thickness.

Drilling My Own...

A typical crib board can have anywhere from around 125 holes to 500 holes, depending on the board size, number of players, track pattern etc. Oddly enough, I have never thought of drilling as tedious or time consuming part of making crib boards. I can drill a smaller board in around 5 minutes (yes I'm bragging), a larger board in under 15 minutes. The point of this post is not to highlight my drill press prowess, but to note a recent change necessitated by a customer request. A very nice woman emailed me and asked for a 4 - Track board for her husband for her anniversary. Not a problem I thought, since I surely have a 4 Track template. Turns out the only 4 track template I have is for the big boards (i.e. The Drive-Thru Tree Series). Oops. I don't have any smaller 4 track templates. But I do have a crib board template maker template. The gentleman who sold crib board templates on Ebay back in 2003/04, sold this funny looking template with holes in different configurations: curves, straight-away sections, etc. I bought one thinking that I could make any template if I ever needed to. I placed it in the Crib template drawer and forgot about until I received the request for the 4 track board. Here was big chance to drill my own crib board template - except mine would be in 1/8" inch plastic instead of steel. (( For the record, I only know of 3 places you can buy cribbage templates online: Rockler (plastic), Lee Valley (paper) and Iasco-tesco (steel). Also, I suspect any reasonable machine shop could also make steel templates for you out of 10 gauge steel. ))

Geodes

Flush with cash from selling my biggest board (Wawona) and arguably my prettiest board (Titan), I did a quick (and expensive) shopping trip to Tropical Exotic Hardwoods of Latin America. I found this place on the web and I can only say Wow! Beautiful, amazing wood on a whole different level. I will be a customer for life. Sam Maloof buys wood from these folks. Anyway...I bought a block of turning stock (Cocobolo) and promptly re-sawed several sticks. Re-sawing cocobolo is a lot like cutting open Geodes . I'm always amazed at what grain pattern I get after I resaw that first piece. Depending on the orientation of the cut, I either get very fine intricate lines or very wide open grain lines with lots of wild and beautiful knot patterns. And the colors are amazing - reds, orange, purple and everything in between. Fun stuff. The only downside (for me) when re-sawing cocobolo is I have to wear some serious dust protection, turn the air-filter on in the shop when I'm done and leave the shop for awhile, otherwise I sneeze like crazy! With these sticks and some other pieces of nice wood I've been picking up, I have board faces for about another 70 boards or so, including another 3 1/2 foot long board. I'm still plugging along on the 38+ boards (as per my website) and I've finished all the squares glue-up on the 9 tournament friendly chessboards. The chessboards still need their bottoms and borders.

Tools...Tools...Tools

I tend to go through tools. I buy 'em, try 'em and if I don't like 'em, I get rid of 'em. Recently, I received a new planer. It is my 4th stand-alone planer. The first planer was a 12" Dewalt portable planer. It was VERY loud, kind of under-powered and would bog down from time to time. I sold it to a co-worker. Planer #2 - now that was a planer. A vintage (made before I was born), 1200 pound 16" Powermatic planer. The entire thing was cast iron. I think it was made sometime in the 1950's. That machine could plane anything and not break a sweat. I really liked that planer, but quite frankly, it was overkill for my little shop. I eventually sold it to a local lumber yard. Planer #3 was a Hitachi 12" Planer I bought from an estate sale. Very, very nice planer. I sold it on Ebay, to make room for Planer #4, another Powermatic planer with a Helical Cutting head. I think the helical cutting head is a concept long overdue in woodworking. Instead of separate elongated knives mounted on a cylindrical shaped head, the helical head has dozens of carbide tipped square shaped cutters arranged in a helical (or spiral) pattern around the cylindrical cutting head. The helical head cuts by shearing off pieces of wood at an angle, similar to the way a hand plane might shear wood off. The results are very pleasing. OK, the results are amazing. This planer looks like a keeper.

64 Great Chess Games - Board Numbers 10-18

Series Title: 64 Great Chess Games (Chess Boards)

Background:

Boards 4-9 are all done with glue and clamps and just need to be sanded and finished. Any board I make, whether cribbage or Chess always looks a bit "rough" until it gets cleaned up. Once a board goes through it's inital clean-up sanding, it starts to reveal what it's going to really look like, and to me, this is the most exciting part of the whole process. I seem to be getting some traction selling Chess boards on Ebay, so I will try and sell boards #4-9 (6 chess boards) on Ebay before the conclusion of the 2007 Holiday Season. Cribbage board sales have been slow to non-existent this Holiday Season despite advertising on Google AdWords, Yahoo, and actually getting the meta-tags right on my WebSite, which in turns allows the WebCrawlers to correctly index my web site.

As mentioned previously, starting with Board #10, the boards will Chess Tournament Legal, with the squares measuring around 2 1/4".

Coming up, boards 10-18 will lay out something like this:

10-12: Hard Maple/IPE for the squares
13-15: Hard Maple/PurpleHeart for the squares - with Paduak inlay around each Square.
16-18: Hard Maple/Walnut for the squares - with Purpleheart inlay around each Square.

Board #3 in this series had some Purpleheart Inlay around the squares, but only on 2 sides. I would like to try the inlay around all 4 sides of the square.

I still have no idea what to charge for a chessboard. Ebay at least helps me get a feel for what is a fair price since I start the auctions at a very reasonable price and let the buyer determine the final price.

Some of the chess boards are turning out pretty heavy. Especially those with Ipe in them. One board weighed in at around 8.5 pounds. The lighter Chess boards weigh in around 3-4 pounds.

64 Great Chess Games - Board Numbers 4 thru 9

Series Title: 64 Great Chess Games (Chess Boards)

Background:
Having finished boards 1-3, it was time to turn my attention to boards 4-9. Naturally these will be a little different than boards 1-3. :-> Boards 4,5,6 are PurpleHeart/White Maple for the squares and boards 7,8,9 are Mahogany/Walnut or Ipe/Mahogany for the squares. The purpleheart/white maple combination is turning out quite nice. I will probably use this combination in the not too distant future.

Ipe is a really, really hard, dense and heavy wood. It's at the top of the chart on the Janks Hardness scale. Ipe adds some real weight to the board too.

As you might imagine, chess boards involve a lot gluing. Each Chess board I make goes through 8 separate glue-ups. Glue ups #1-4 are for gluing the 64 squares. Glue up number 5 is the bottom of the board. I don't put felt on the bottom of my chess boards. I use another hardwood for the bottom, typically cherry, oak or mahogany, that is pretty light in color. I do this so I can write a bunch of stuff on the bottom, specifically all the chess moves from the board from the Famous Chess Game your board is named after. Glue ups #6-8 are for the 3 borders that are found on each board. Each border is glued up separately and is successively thicker than the previous border. The outer most border is mitered (45 degree angles) on the corners.

Starting with board #10, I will start making the Chess boards tournament legal. Currently boards 1-9 are made with approximately 1 3/4" squares. Starting with board #10 in the series, I will make the squares 2 1/4" inch.