CRIBBAGE, ANYONE?

I am posting this retrospectively, or retroactively, or posthumously, or whatever the correct term is for blogging about something that happened a long time ago...

Awhile back, I made a cribbage board for my friend, Chris, as a going away present. He was probably my best friend here in KS while he was here, and now he is off to law school. Anyway, he had once made a comment about how I should make cribbage boards out of all the oak cutoffs I had laying around. So I took the cutoff ends from each end of the crib legs (each of which was made of 3 pieces of laminated oak), and glued those up, then ran them through the planer. Of course, I couldn't be satisfied with just drilling some holes, and calling it good. I chose to make it a little more challenging, and try something I'd never done before: inlay. I used my tablesaw blade (1/8" wide), raised to 1/8" above the table, to cut grooves in the blank that I had made by gluing together those cutoffs. Then I cut some 1/8" strips of walnut from that pile of old reclaimed walnut timbers I bought awhile back--I don't think I posted about that. They were in a big pile with some white oak timbers, all of which came from an old house in Lawrence. Man. Houses were built to last back then. Anyway, since my bandsaw is pretty iffy, accuracy-wise, I had to cut quite a few, and do lots of fussing with each piece of inlay, but eventually it came out OK. Not perfect, but acceptable.

Then I trimmed the extra length off the side, and added some walnut trim around the whole thing:






I realized, though, that there was no place to store pegs. I pondered this quite awhile. I decided to cut off the end (including some of the oak and walnut trim) and put it on with a hinge, then drill a hole back into the blank for storing pins. Well, that didn't work, for a number of reasons, the first of which was that the hinge just wasn't sturdy enough. So I settled on a beefier hinge, and just having the walnut cap flip up and down. That worked lots better. I inset a rare earth magnet in the cap and the blank, so that it would snap and stay closed. Then I drilled the hole back into the blank for the pins. That was a little tricky, since I couldn't get off very far without punching through either side of the blank. It worked fine.

I thought about trying to turn pins from oak dowels by mounting them in my drill press and going after them with my chisel, like a mini, vertical lathe. Some experimentation made me think that would be too hard, and produce tool inconsistent a result. So I wandered the local hardware store for awhile, and settled on some steel shelf pins. They are pretty much perfect, except they were a little thicker than what I'd wanted originally. Drilling the holes in that end grain was tough, and even with it on my drill press, the bit wandered a little on some of the holes. It's probably not more than 1/32", but it's enough to be noticeable when they're all in a line like that.






The last step was to put my moniker on it, and a dedication. That came out OK, I think. I was a little worried about it, since I didn't have much room to work with, and I'm rusty with a Dremel tool. The magnets work well--it's just as effective as a catch, and more elegant. When the cap snaps closed, you really can't tell that it opens, unless you look fairly closely.



This probably won't be the last cribbage board I make. I like the look of the inlay, so I'll probably repeat that. I learned a few lessons that will make things easier, I think.

-m