# Cribbage Board Questions?



## dummkauf (Jun 11, 2010)

New to the forum. I just started wood working again as i haven't done anything since I was still living at home and had access to my father's garage. It's now been about a decade since I moved out and my garage is getting filled with enough tools to start getting back into this, as well as I seem to have the time for it now too! 

So for a first project I decided to make a cribbage board with some wood inlays. Here's where I'm at so far









Just got the inlays glued in, and I still need to glue the main board to the base underneath it.

The main board is made out of cherry, the wood around the edge is maple and the tracks are made out of maple and walnut. I've gotten this far but have some questions on finishing it now. 

First, drilling holes. I've seen online a lot of guys making jigs for this, but since I need to holes to go straight down the tracks, I'm not sure if I can really position them dead center on the tracks with a jig. So right now what I am thinking is to draw out where they need to go with pencil(making a grid on the wood basically). Then taking a small punch and making a small hole where the center of each hole needs to go, and then taking the drill press to it(will take forever I know), but I am just curious if anyone has any other suggestions for tackling the hole drilling process.

Also, I left the tracks raised a little bit on purpose. I am going to take a belt sander to get them closer and then shave the whole board down about 1/32" with a planer so I should have a nice smooth surface. However I'm wondering if I should drill my holes before sanding/planing it down so I can correct any chipping when drilling the holes. However I'm not sure if this is a good idea as my planer is a dewalt that has a whole bunch of staggered little teeth(as opposed to the one long blade on older planers) that I am worried might chip the holes when it goes through, but I am not sure. If I were to plane it down and then drill the holes, any tips for drilling the holes without getting any chipping around the holes?

Any other tips/suggestions of finishing this. I am planning on routing the edges, not sure what shape yet, to finish it off. As for finishing it, since I'm not really in a huge rush, I am thinking of rubbing a few coats of pure tung oil in and then trying to do a french polish over that. I've used shellac before but never done a french polish, so figured I'd give it a shot on this project.


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## mdntrdr (Dec 22, 2009)

You should be able to drill after, a quality, sharp bit, should reduce tear out.

your finish sanding should take care of any deviation.

That's gonna be a sweet board!

I have fond memorys playing cribage with my Grandfather!


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## Ghidrah (Mar 2, 2010)

dummkauf,
If you're using a drill press and the table is set at-0- it will drill at 90°. Not knowing what the spread is for the peg holes I'd suggest you make an index jig for the drill press, make a template from it and use it as an overlay on the cribbage board.

The template will make future boards easier to make


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## GEMNW (Apr 17, 2010)

*Crib pegs*

That looks like one beautiful board! How about custom pegs to go with it. I use to make pegs all the time for my boards.
I use to go to a lot of garage sales. I picked up a lot of the metal picks that come with nut bowls. They are narrow with a finial on the top and taper on the lower end. I would saw off about 1 1/4" with the finial. Chuck them in a drill and turn them at slow speed against a grinder. Taper about the lower 1/3 until they fit the peg holes. Once you have six of them you can paint a couple of the rings in pairs of red, green. and black. They look good and you can pick them up cheap.


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## dummkauf (Jun 11, 2010)

Ghidrah said:


> dummkauf,
> If you're using a drill press and the table is set at-0- it will drill at 90°. Not knowing what the spread is for the peg holes I'd suggest you make an index jig for the drill press, make a template from it and use it as an overlay on the cribbage board.
> 
> The template will make future boards easier to make


Thanks for the tip. I'm not really planning on making any more boards, and if I do I don't think I'll be doing this type of inlay, thinking maybe just some straight tracks without the curves if I ever do it again.


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## dummkauf (Jun 11, 2010)

mdntrdr said:


> You should be able to drill after, a quality, sharp bit, should reduce tear out.
> 
> your finish sanding should take care of any deviation.
> 
> ...


Thanks for the tip. I just planed the surface down tonight and am planning on drilling them out hopefully on sunday, and the sanding it down and hopefully get it glued to the base sunday as well.


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## dummkauf (Jun 11, 2010)

GEMNW said:


> That looks like one beautiful board! How about custom pegs to go with it. I use to make pegs all the time for my boards.
> I use to go to a lot of garage sales. I picked up a lot of the metal picks that come with nut bowls. They are narrow with a finial on the top and taper on the lower end. I would saw off about 1 1/4" with the finial. Chuck them in a drill and turn them at slow speed against a grinder. Taper about the lower 1/3 until they fit the peg holes. Once you have six of them you can paint a couple of the rings in pairs of red, green. and black. They look good and you can pick them up cheap.


Actually I've been thinking about the custom pegs. My father-in-law has one of those shop smith systems that can be setup as a lathe and I was debating making custom pegs out of the scrap wood since I've got cherry, maple, and walnut, I could theoretically make all three sets with different colors and then run a little of my tung oil into them to finish. My only concern is whether or not I can make something that small on a lathe, but I suppose I could try your trick too, cut down some board, put them in a drill and then somehow taking sand paper to them to make the taper. 

Is it possible to make pegs like this on a large lathe, or would I need small lathe specially for making small pieces like this?

Here's a pic of where it's at as of tonight








There's some glue on it as I found another tip online for taking care of cracks around inlays online. Just took some sand paper, sanded enough to make saw dust and rubbed the dust into the cracks. I then took some clear super glue to it which gets absorbed into the dust and hardens. Then just sand it down. i tried this on some other scrap, and you can kind of tell that it's been done, but you really need to be looking for it, and in my opinion it looks better than having a space there.

Thanks for all the replies thus far!


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## Ghidrah (Mar 2, 2010)

Dummkauf,
I thought the same thing when I built my youngest a Mancala board for her birthday, "Just One", never heard of the game never saw an example of the board until I looked it up on the net. I made a nice portable hinged one out of Maple, Oak and Mahogany, oiled it down with Tung oil it came out nice.

She brought it to school to play with friends and all of a sudden I had parents calling for one of a kind Mancala boards. The jigs I made for my little's board and others made for successive boards got mixed and matched to keep all unique.

When the kids were littles and wifey cut hair at home she used to take her customers for walks around the yard, (it's been dubbed visually active) I made an old NE covered bridge for the garden gate post to keep her garden tools out of the weather. Before the summer began I had orders for bird houses, covered bridges and mailboxes.


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## dummkauf (Jun 11, 2010)

Ghidrah said:


> Dummkauf,
> I thought the same thing when I built my youngest a Mancala board for her birthday, "Just One", never heard of the game never saw an example of the board until I looked it up on the net. I made a nice portable hinged one out of Maple, Oak and Mahogany, oiled it down with Tung oil it came out nice.
> 
> She brought it to school to play with friends and all of a sudden I had parents calling for one of a kind Mancala boards. The jigs I made for my little's board and others made for successive boards got mixed and matched to keep all unique.
> ...


Only caveat there is that I don't have the free time to build boards for everyone who may want one which is why this 1 board has taken me so long, and I don't think they'd want to pay what I'd ask, those in-lays were a pain and took forever which means I'd be asking far too much for a cribbage board, though I suppose if someone was willing to pay that much I would have no problem just taking the time to manually mark out the holes either way. 

Just say "No"! :no:


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## Ghidrah (Mar 2, 2010)

For what its worth,

with practice comes confidence, with confidence comes speed.

The learning curve can be hell, early in my framing career one of my employers took on many 1st time projects, (usually custom residential or convoluted and often "A" symmetrical condos). He stated the 1st unit was free and he made his money on the rest.

The learning curve provides the solutions, solutions require practice,


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## dummkauf (Jun 11, 2010)

It actually only took me about 30 or 40 minutes to mark out the lines on the board and about an hour to drill them all, which isn't too bad in my opinion. Though I did discover that regular drill bits don't work the best for drilling the holes. Dug out the bits used for drilling counter-sunk holes as those drill bits have a point on the end and taper out to the full width of the bit. I left the counter sink piece off and it worked much better than a regular drill bit, no breakage around the holes at all with the tapered bit. Also managed to get it glued to the base, trimmed the edges down and got them routed. Didn't take any pics of the back, but I started routing out the holes to store a deck of cards and the pegs. I have a left over piece of Walnut that I will be using as a slide door to cover the holes and keep the cards and pegs in, also thinking about sinking some rare earth magnets in somewhere to help hold the drawer/wood piece in place(not sure about the magnets just yet though)

Here's where it is as of tonight









And since I'm still thinking about doing a french polish on this, does anyone have experience polishing a piece like this? I understand that technique for flat pieces, like the top and bottom of the board, but how do you apply it to the curved pieces on the edge that I routed out?


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## b00kemdano (Feb 10, 2009)

Oh wow, that's beautiful! I want to make some cribbage boards, but I haven't been inspired to yet. 

Are you going to inlay a skunk?


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## Streamwinner (Nov 25, 2008)

Wow, that's nice. Great work.


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## dummkauf (Jun 11, 2010)

b00kemdano said:


> Oh wow, that's beautiful! I want to make some cribbage boards, but I haven't been inspired to yet.
> 
> Are you going to inlay a skunk?


Already did 

You'll notice that the skunk line and double skunk lines are inlaid with Walnut, all the rest of the dividers are Maple. As far as embedding an actual "S", no I am not. I am all done with the inlays at this point. Only things left is to carve out the bottom to hold cards/pegs, sand it all, and start the finish.


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## dummkauf (Jun 11, 2010)

Streamwinner said:


> Wow, that's nice. Great work.


Thank you!


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## b00kemdano (Feb 10, 2009)

OIC! I didn't notice till you said it, that's very clever!


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