Custom
Checkerboard
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I made
this checkerboard for my Father-in-Law's 70th birthday. The
squares are walnut and maple, each one 2.5". There is a thin
inlay of red oak around the squares, then the outer frame of
walnut. Overall size is approximately 24" square.
It is finished with three coats of super-blonde shellac, followed by
paste wax. It took me approximately 18 hours over 7 days to
complete.
Scroll down for construction details...
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Construction Details
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I started
with
rough lumber from a sawmill. The
boards are planed down to 3/4" thick and then cut into eight strips,
2.5 x 21" (four maple and four walnut).
Here I'm running them all through the planner on edge to clean up the
edges and make them all exactly 2.5" wide.
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Next the strips are glued up into one board, as shown below.
[Lesson
Learned: If I were to do this again, I'd do multiple
glue-ups, as
shown in the photo further down. Trying to glue together
eight
strips at once and keep them aligned and flat was - um - challenging.]
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After the glue sets, rotate the board 90 degrees and cut it up again
into 2.5" strips...
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...then, of course, you flip every other strip and glue it all back
together again.
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As mention above, it was much easier to handle multiple glue-ups of a
couple strips at a time. Before I did the final glue-up of
the two halves, I ran each one through the planer to clean them
up. This resulted in a lot less sanding afterwards. |
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Finally, I added the thin inlay of red oak (that was two additional
glue-ups, by the way) and then the outer frame of walnut, shown
here.
I used a router to ease the top and bottom edges with a 1/4" round-over
bit, and then applied the finish, as discussed above. |
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Evelyn and Albert try out his gift during his birthday party at our
place, Memorial Day weekend. |
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One final note: I decided to build this exactly one week
before the party. (Like I didn't already have enough to
do!) I figured I would build the board and then just buy a
nice wooden set of checkers locally. (Wrong!)
So on Monday - six days before the party - I started calling around
trying to locate a set of wooden checkers worthy of the board I was
about to build. :) I called every gift shop, game
store, comic book store, toy store, etc. in the tri-state
area. No one had a decent set of checkers - just the cheapo
plastic toy type that kids use. I finally found what I was
looking for on a website:
a beautiful wooden set of basswood and ebony.
Perfect. Except they were located in Portland, Oregon and I'm
located in Delaware. So I had them shipped 2nd-Day
Air. (Luckily, checkers don't weigh very much...)
If you decided to build a chess or checkers board - or are just looking
for a really nice set - I highly recommend The
Chess Store. The woman I spoke with was very
helpful and assured me that the checkers would ship out that
day. The quality of the checkers I bought is exceptional and
their selection is huge.
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Recommended Reading:
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©
2008
nestlerode.org
Modified on Apr 14, 2008
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