My very own State of the State Address for 2008

It’s been an interesting year for selling cribbage and chess boards (and now plastic drilling templates as well). There were many firsts for me this year. 2009 will mark my 3rd year of selling cribbage and chess boards.

I sold my first Tournament Size Chess boards this past year.

I sold a Cribbage board for over a $100. Granted, this was a personally significant board, but still…for a guy who started selling boards for $3, this was a personal milestone. This board sold on esty.com, by the way. If you have handmade wares to sell, etsy.com is the way to go.

I stopped using my metal templates to drill with and now I drill boards with the plastic template clones (just like the ones I sell). There are a couple of reasons I did this. One, it’s a lot easier to drill a board with an 8 ounce plastic template mounted on it, instead of a 3 pound rolled steel metal template. It cuts down on tear-out on the board since I can get the template really tight against the board. And since I’m using clear plastic, I can position the template somewhat in case the board pattern/wood grain pattern nicely compliment each other.

I sold 33 plastic drilling templates in just 6 months. I now sell 12 different styles of cribbage board templates, done in various kinds of plastic (chemcast, poly-carbonate, and the blue plastic backed kind). Hopefully, I will increase the number of templates I sell to 19 different types in 2009.

My website started showing up on the first page of Google/Yahoo/MSN search results, when searched on the words, “Cribbage board(s)”. It doesn’t consistently show up on the first page – it’s more of an intermittent thing.

The number of unique (new) visitors per day to my website finally got out of the single digit range. In the month of December, I saw 30-50 unique (new) visitors to the website per day.

I started selling cribbage and chess boards on etsy.com with some success. I abandoned my first etsy handle (“19pointhand”) and went back to the more familiar "enumerocribbageboard". I would have added an “s”, but etsy.com has a 20 character limit on names.

I learned that people really, really like the 3 player continuous track style board and I will be making a lot more boards in that style (just a soon as I finish drilling the 80+ tournament style boards), I have the queue right now.

I’m finally started to feel (after completing about 200 boards) that my self-imposed apprenticeship in board making is coming to an end. I’m looking forward to taking what I’ve learned thus far and carrying it forward.

PolyCarbonate and Google Searches

It would appear that after 2+ years of selling cribbage boards on the Internet, my website is starting to show up on the first page of google.com search results under the very generic terms, "Cribbage boards" and "cribbage board". I've been as high as position #4 on the first page of google.com results. I wish I could say being in such a high position has sent sales through the roof, but it hasn't. I'm not surprised. I know from first hand experience my cribbage boards sell much better when the buyer can see them up close and personal, touch them, look at the different kinds of boards, rattle the boards and hear the metal pegs rolling around in the peg storage department. I will say that etsy.com has been helpful in selling boards. Buyers go to etsy.com looking for artisan quality hand made items.

On a different note, my little side business of selling crib templates is humming along. Making a board template involves little more effort than simply drilling the holes, so they are pretty straight forward to make. Right now I offer 11 different templates for sale (and counting).

I was fortunate enough to get a decent supply of Polycarbonate plastic from my local Tap Plastics. I now use 3 different kinds of plastic for cribbage board templates: resin cast (the blue plastic backed plastic), chemcast (the paper backed plastic) and now the "bullet-proof" polycarbonate plastic. The polycarbonate plastic seems pretty indestructible.

Chessboards 10-12 (in the series of 64) have been released.

Chessboards 10-12 (in the series of 64 Great Chess Games) have been released. These are tournament friendly boards. The squares measure APPROXIMATELY 2 1/4" x 2 1/4". There are still 6 boards (#13-18) that aren't quite complete and should be finished soon. All boards now come with a complimentary set of 32 wood chess pieces (Kings Measure 1 3/4" high) and a small hardwood box for chess piece storage.

• Board #10 has 147 distinct pieces of wood. This board is made up of the following 9 species of woods: Squares: IPE & Maple, Inlay Around Squares: Paduak& Purpleheart Border: Cherry, Mahogany& Walnut Bottom Strips: Poplar and Redwood.

• Board #11 has 146 distinct pieces of wood. This board is made up of the following 9 species of woods: Squares: IPE & Maple, Inlay Around Squares: Paduak& Purpleheart Border: Cherry, Mahogany& Walnut Bottom Strips: Poplar and Redwood.
  

• Board #12 has 91 distinct pieces of wood. This board is made up of the following 7 different woods: Squares: Walnut & Maple Inlay on One Sides of Squares: Purpleheart Border: Cherry, Mahogany& Walnut Bottom Strips: Poplar & Redwood.
  

The Sander is Fixed - More chessboards coming soon

Turns out the good folks at Woodmaster sent me the wrong size threaded rods for my broken Drum Sander. The ones they sent were too short. Of course I found this out AFTER I put them in the sander. But...much to my surprise, I was able to re-use the old rods. I spent the better part of my Saturday drilling for the new support brackets and putting the old threaded rods back in, but my beloved drum sander is working again. I tested my fix by cleaning up 3 chess boards and I'm almost ready to post those 3 boards for sale on the Website. I've also completed the initial face glue ups on about 95 cribbage boards and I've started on gluing up the bottoms for those boards. I have to say some the tournament size Cocobolo boards are pretty wild looking! The grain patterns of book matched Cocobolo are just amazing. The 10 most prettiest/most exotic looking boards (of the 35+ Tournament style Cocobolo boards) will be in a series titled "Favorite Comic Strips of the Past & Present". The 10 boards are named after my 10 favorite comic strips and each board will include a signed Anthology (collection of various comic strips) from my self-published comic strip, "The Help Desk".

The Saga of my Broken Drum Sander Continues...

The saga of my broken drum sander continues . I found out that the threaded support rods aren't the only stripped out part on the sander. It turns out that threaded rods thread through brackets that supports the entire roller bed-the part of the sander where you place an item to sand. Fortunately, I found this out AFTER I called the maker of the Drum Sander (Woodmaster Tools) and was told that I would likely findthat these brackets wouldhave stripped out as well. But all is not lost. Woodmaster sells a retro-fit bracket that should (hopefully) allow me to fix this problem and finish sanding up the 9 chessboards that have been sitting in the queue awaiting completion for the last several months.

Templates, Window Shoppers, A Broken Drum Sander and Gluing Like Crazy

"Templates, Window Shoppers, A Broken Drum Sander and Gluing Like Crazy" is kind of a funny title, but accurately reflects the status of EnumeroCribbageBoards at the moment. I see lots of Window Shoppers (in etsy.com) and to a lesser degree on my website, my beloved drum sander is broke at the moment and I'm gluing up new cribbage boards like crazy.

Templates

Crib board template sales seemed to peak in September, maybe due to the fact people are making crib boards for the Holidays? I'm no longer using the cheaper plastic for the templates. I'm using a material called Chemcast Acrylic Plastic, either in a 1/4" or 3/8" thickness. It costs me between $11.00 to $15.00 a square foot. It's expensive, but it's really nice stuff to work with. It drills nicely and is really solid - not likely to crack or chip. My templates are still quite a bit less than other vendor's who sell plastic drill templates and the material is really thick!

Window Shoppers

Etsy.com is a pretty neat site, since it caters to people who make "stuff" and gives them another outlet to sell their wares. I like it and it's very affordable. A quick count shows I've gotten about 1100 viewings on the inventory sitting on etsy.com at the moment, but no sales in the last couple of months.

A Broken Drum Sander

My beloved 38" Woodmaster drum sander has been acting odd of late, and I finally figured out why. Two of it's 4 threaded rods used to raise and lower the feed bed, are stripped out. Needless to say, you want things to be pretty level when sanding, and stripped rods cause the feed bed to list to one side and make for very inconsistent results. The replacement parts have been ordered. I'm not looking forward to replacing those rods.

Gluing Like Crazy

The large group of boards I'm working on at the moment (100+ boards) are all mostly tournament style (long, narrow, single pass). I've glued faces to about 50 them and I am humming along on the rest. The prices on these boards will be vary from anywhere from $19 on the low end to $53 on the high end. The board faces on the $53 board will be pretty amazing looking. They're made from 2 strips of book-matched cocobolo and the grain patterns are just out of this world! These 100+ boards will be divided into 15 new series.

Templates are Selling Well - Who Knew?

I offer cribbage board drilling templates for sale. They are made of 3/16" or 1/4" thick plastic cloned off my existing metal templates or made from scratch using my template maker. In a sudden and unexpected surge of interest in cribbage board templates, I've sold 3 templates this week and I am working on a 4th custom template as per a customer's request. I figured if I sold one template a year, that would be cool.

If I had one pet peeve in this universe, it would be craftspeople who make and sell cribbage boards with sloppy, misaligned hole patterns. We as humans, simply cannot drill several hundred very tiny holes in perfect alignment. I don't buy the argument that it makes the board look more authentic, more hand-made.

My wife wonders if I'm hurting my own cribbage board business by selling templates and I don't think so. There are an estimated 2 million people who play cribbage on a regular basis. To date, I've sold 8 templates.