Make Your State or Country Cribbage Board

Why play cribbage on one of those boring rectangular prisms when you can be way cooler!!! You could even hang this on your wall. Think of all the time you could save...not having to walk to the game closet...opening the door...shuffling around for that dusty cribbage board that you are too embarrassed to leave sitting out...then forgetting what you were trying to do. O yeah, play some cribbage.

• Cherry Glue up that is 13" by 14" x 1.5"
• 5" x 5" x 1/8" piece of plexiglass
• Cribbage Pegs
• Deck of Cards
• Laser
• CNC

I was at a friend's house when I saw this piece of art on her wall. I inquired about it because I thought it was super cool. She informed me that her nephew designed this piece of art as an undergraduate in college.

Let me break this down for my non-Wisconsin living friends on Instructables and explain why this Wisconsin piece of art is so awesome. The words in the photo are not random just to make the shape of the state of Wisconsin. The letters make up the name of each county in Wisconsin in the shape of the county it is representing.

I outlined two counties in green to demonstrate my point, Sauk and Jackson.

Now you can impress all of your friends with your newfound Wisconsin knowledge. Not only will you know the name of each county in the state of Wisconsin, you will also know the counties relative shape and location.

You're welcome. So many friends will be impressed by your obscure knowledge of the state that looks like a mitten.

This lead me to asking the artist if I could use his work to make some unique cribbage boards that are worthy to hang up on my wall. He agreed as long as I made one for him as well.

Deal!!!

I think these boards will make for some great gifts for my family members in the future.

I am no svg Illustrator God. That is what the art guy was for. He gave me the svg file of the picture I saw at my friends house, but that was it. I had to do the rest as a lowly rookie Illustrator peasant.

As a semi-functioning self proclaimed adult I went to google and searched "Wisconsin Silhottes" and that is when I realized I had no idea how to properly spell the word "silhouette." Nailed it.

This is where you could pick your own state or country to make your own custom cribbage board. I traced the file in Illustrator and spent an embarrassing long amount of time learning basic functions in Illustrator. I ended up tracing the state of Wisconsin using the silhouette as a template. I then offset the file to make the center running track around the state.

I used the artist's graphic for the main focal point. If I did not have that file I think I would have done one of the following:

• Used a road map of the state.
• Used a county map of the state.

Then came the all of the holes. That was a chore. All 391 of them... I am sure there is a super awesome way placing holes equidistantly around a vector for all of the cribbage holes, but I could not find it. Instead I painstakingly placed each hole manually. Not fun. I added some lines and text to indicate every 5 holes to number the board.

Maybe someone in the comments can tell me how to do this much more efficiently.

UPDATE:

LesliR gave the following sage advice in laying out all of those holes:

"For placing the holes in illustrator the easiest way I can think of the top of my head is to use the blend tool.

1) create the path you want the dots to follow. Try to use as few nodes as possible. Copy and paste, then scale the path to create your 3 paths.

2) Place your start dot at the beginning of the first path, then create your end dot at the end of the first path. Repeat on the other 2 paths.

3) go to object>blend>blend options. Select specified steps then type in 119 as Illustrator doesn’t count the dots you have already created in the step count

4) select both the start and end dot, go to object>blend>make. It might look a little crazy at this point as it will be a straight line of dots between the start and end dot.

5) select the blend you just create and the path you want the dots to follow then go to object>blend>replace spine and the dots should follow the path! You might need to go into your direct selection tool and edit the path to smooth out any parts where the dots are too close.

6) repeat with the other 2 paths

7) when finished select the paths then go to blend expand. Then object>ungroup. Then you can go and move any individual dots that may be to close or look out of place.

I hope this makes enough sense to be helpful! I just tested it and it took me just a few minutes to place all dots around a path!"

Thank you LesliR I am pretty sure you would have just one your Hogwarts house some serious points!!!

For those not familiar with VCarve I highly recommend it. I imported my svg file and was able to generate my GCode quickly. You could also have generated the GCode using Fusion 360 using the CAD/CAM feature.

I prefer to use VCarve for my woodworking projects and Fusion 360 for my projects using plastic or metal.

Lets just get this out in the open. I failed a lot.

I live by Tom Kelly's quote, "Fail often so you can succeed sooner. "

I went through many iterations before ending up at my final result. I started with pine because I had some laying around the house and I figured it was a great place to start.

1. The first error lasering was turning up too light. Naturally I thought ok "Well I will just paint in the lasering." Nope that took too long and did not look good at all. The paint just ran with the grain and looked like my failed attempt to color between the lines in kindergarten.
2. Well what if I just CNC everything.......nope. Looks awful and would take all day. I mean it. All day. Like a 24 hour run time. Nope....moving on.
3. At this point I went back to the laser and made some modifications to increase the speed/power and my results were better, but not great.
4. What if I switched to a different species of wood? Cherry should laser great, but it did not do so hot. So I ran the program twice. Still not dark enough.

At this point I realized I needed a more powerful laser. I could not get my hands on one at this point of the project. I needed to figure something else out for right now just in case.

I needed a win at this point in the project. So here is what I did. I needed to prevent the paint from running through the pores of the wood then it was applied. So I wanted to seal those pores up tight before applying some paint.

1. Applied a coat of sanding sealer to help close up the pores of the wood.
2. Next I applied three thins coats of spray lacquer. Why spray lacquer? Because I did not want to accidently fill in any of the holes that were drilled. That would have been a bummer.
3. I then applied a coat of Paste Finishing Wax. Now those pores should be closed to prevent the paint from bleeding throughout the grain. The wax also makes it easier to remove excess paint in the next step.
4. I used some umber colored acrylic paint and a powered toothbrush to fill in the lasered portion of the board.
5. I removed the excess paint with a clean rag and reapplied another coat of wax to seal in the paint once the paint was dried.

Okay, this was a win. It looks like this may work if I cannot get my hands on a better laser.

I could also ditch the laser all together. I have used the below strategies before that do not use a laser, but instead a household printer:

1. I could use some acetone and transfer over a printed page from an inkjet printer to the cribbage board.
2. I could do an image transfer using some Modge Podge.

Call me lazy, but I really wanted the laser to work out.

Now that I have a semi functional laser model I can make some blanks to do a production run while I hunt down a more powerful laser to use.

After sizing and resizing my wood blanks I finally decided on the following rough sized Cherry glue up that is 13" by 14" x 1.5."

To do this I ripped a bunch of boards on the table saw 1.5" wide and 14" long. I did not worry about board thickness at all. I thought it was neat to have some variety of thicknesses in the boards. Next I turned up the boards and faced glued them together using clamps and wood glue. I then planed down the wood after the glue up to 1.25" thick. This gave the board some heft to it and would allow me to place a pocket in the back to store some pegs along with a deck of cards.

I went through the following procedures with the CNC.

1. I started with the pocket on the back of the board for the deck of cards and pegs.
2. Next I flipped over the board to drill all of those holes.
3. Lastly I had the CNC cut out the Wisconsin state profile.

This left me with a sharp edged ballooned looking Wisconsin cribbage board.

Because I apparently could not measure correctly the CNC did not cut to the final depth. I smoothed out the edges using a round over bit on a router table on both the front and back of the Wisconsin Cribbage Board.

At this point I was able to get my hands on a more powerful laser. The previous laser I had been using was a Dremel. Although super user friendly, the Dremel was not doing what I needed it to do. It could have been user error, but I was failing and was ready to move on. I got my hands on a Glowforge and decided to put it to work....and immediately failed on the first attempt.

Apparently if your thickness is over a half inch you need to remove the crumb tray....oops. Well.....crap. This was a major oversight on my part. This sucker burned straight through the wood into the pocket below. That is a quarter inch of solid cherry that I could see daylight through. My peers quickly named this board two face.

After making some height adjustments by removing the crumb tray this time and reran the file again over the ruined board to make sure that in the future the laser file would work. It did. Time to make another blank and make some more laser adjustments to the power/speed settings to improve the quality of the lasering.

P.S. I gave two face to my least favorite sibling.

This one turned out. I think I got this laser thing dialed in. I used the settings provided in this Glowforge document that the Glowforge community members had created for nonproof grade material (any material Glowforge does not sell directly from it's store is considered nonproof grade).

The Settings I used for engraving Cherry were the following:

• Speed- 700
• Power- 90
• Lines Per Inch- 270

I designed a deck/peg holder for the back pocket of the cribbage board. The design took a while to come up with. My inspiration was an junction box outlet cover. Using that concept I drew up a profile to be lasered out. Might as well add some branding on there as well. This way my siblings have to think of me each time they play the game.

Two logos 3 inches apart. Too much? Never.

The idea is that the cover can swing back to expose the cards and pegs that are stored in the back pocket for easy accessibility.

At this point I ran a production run for future gifts for family members and some weird things happened. I decided to cut all of the back pockets for the cribbage boards one after another. This way I could just run the same GCode over and over without having to change the CNC's hold down setup. If I ran the same GCode three times in a row the program would always fail. Twice would run great, but three times in a row would cause the CNC to wander. I could not figure out why this was happening and I still have no clue. To avoid this issue I would just re-upload the GCode file fresh each time.

Guess I have two more mistakes for my next two least favorite siblings...

I ended up making a larger cover for the oversized deck pocket mistake. But this mistake is also an opportunity!!! Now my older siblings can use an oversized deck of cards to help them see in their old age.

The other mistake with the channel, I chiseled out the loose wood and then filled the channel with multiple layers of wood putty.

To finish off the cribbage boards I did the following:

1. With a round over bit on the router table I smoothed over all of the edges of the boards.
2. Sanded the boards
3. Applied a coat of natural colored stain
4. Then applied 3 coats of spray lacquer
5. Attached the deck pocket cover with two screws
6. Added some adhesive backed felt pads

All in all this was a neat project where I was able to learn some new skills. It would be neat to do this for other states or countries, but I would seriously need to level up my Illustrator game.

Some of you may be wondering what the Friday Fish Fry Dinner is all about. Get ready for some more super awesome Wisconsin knowledge to drop on all of your new friends. Friday Fish Fries are a staple in Wisconsin. All year round you would be hard pressed not to find a fish fry in any town in Wisconsin. Add in an old fashion as a beverage and you will be crowned as an honorary Wisconsinite for the day.