Scrabble tabble

[JoshD]

This is actually something I did a few months ago (birthday present for my wife). It's a scrabble table---as long as you're enough of a hard core scrabble nut to be happy with the power squares being colour-coded (pink, red, lt blue, dk blue). It's made from walnut solids: I cut up a slab and acclimatised it to indoor conditions while gradually handplaning it down to final size. So far, no warping! The letters are held in place by 3mm dowels cut from bog oak and sycamore, with the lighter wood showing the power squares: super fiddly to cut. The big curved leg is offset to allow you to slide the table under a sofa. It's made from a sustainable hardwood called ipe, comonly used for hardwood decking. I ripped it into strips with 6degree bevelled sides, glued it, and blackened it by fuming with ammonia ...

 

[gregmcateer]

Bloody ****!
That is a work of art - I'd be scared to damage it through use.
Amazing

 

[JoshD]

Thanks! it's pretty damn solid, we play scrabble on it most days

 

[Yojevol]

Wonderful job.
Some more details on how it was made would be interesting, eg, how the 1000 odd holes and dowels were made.
Brian

 

[akirk]

love it - but intrigued... what was your thinking behind having the dowels rather than for example inlays - was it to hold the tiles in place as you rotate the top? don't think that my scrabble board has any means of holding the tiles in place and that hasn't been a big issue...

 

[JoshD]

akirk, yes indeed the dowels keep the pieces in place as you rotate the board (it has a built in ball-bearing turntable that you can see in one of the photos). I had thought of using wooden dividing strips but I wanted to be able to show when the square is a power square in a way that you can see when the tile is in place. I also wanted to emphasise the continuity of the grain of the slab. Both these factors pointed towards the dowels.

Yojevol, as you say there are nearly a thousand little dowels in there. drilling the holes and popping the dowels in sounds like the hard bit but its relatively easy. I layed out the grid on a sheet of 1.6mm plywood and kept it in place as I drilled all the holes through into the board. That meant that I could cut the dowels all flush to the ply, sand down the cut tops of the dowels, then peel away the ply to reveal the finished board (I oiled the main slab before all this).

The hard bit is actually making the dowels. I attach a photo of my dowel maker: you start off cutting say a 5mm square rod, pop it in a drill chuck and spin it through successively smaller holes drilled in a piece of steel. It helps quite a lot to cut an angled slot from the edge of the steel in to the hole: you can sharpen the cut edge and it acts as a cutter. Works a treat to make any size dowel ... except when the dowels get down to 4mm diameter or less when they just want to splinter given the slightest opportunity. I just persisted, trying always to be gentle, to use straight grained wood, and not to be too ambitious on length, probably 200mm max.

I'm working on a mark 2 dowel maker where I still spin the dowel in a drill, but use the high-speed rotating blade of a router to do the cutting. Works in principle but very fiddly to set up ....

 

[billw]

That's a definite labour of love. Great work! How many hours did the top take?

 

[Richard Berry]

Nice work! This is way better than the backgammon board I made.

You lose scrabble points for the thread title though.

 

[JoshD]

As regards time, well the time consuming thing was fixing all my cock ups! The whole project took me a couple of months, but the things that look fiddly were quick: about a day to mark up the plywood template for the dowel holes, 2-3 days making dowels, a day putting it together.

But preparing the three circles of wood was pretty time consuming: my walnut slab had shakes and cracks, so my first step was to stabilise the slab by setting it in epoxy, then cutting/sanding the epoxy off so that it was left in the shakes and cracks. There was a lot of hand planing then to get the workpieces to thickness. After each bout of planing I brought the slabs back into the house and monitored them for warp over the next few days.

My original idea was a reversible top, but I realised it would be hard to design a good docking system, but I thought this was essential because I wanted to be able to use the top as a standalone board on say a dining table. It took a bit of work to design a system which guided the aluminium bearing rings into the right place even if you were pretty sloppy in putting the top on the table.

 

[thetyreman]

amazing work, I've never seen anything quite like it before, it looks beautiful as well as being functional, I could honestly imagine seeing this in an art gallery or museum it's that nice.

 

[JoshD]

Thank you for your lovely kind words!

 

[Fitzroy]

awesome, that's two of your projects that are interesting and different, more please!

 

[sammy.se]

Very impressive, creative and unique! Well done!!

 

[pe2dave]

I'm impressed. My first reaction, I wonder what Steve (blind from birth, whizz braille reader) would make of it!
... Todays short story is.....
I envy your patience with the dowelling jig! Big #fail with some ebony.

 

[Yojevol]

@JoshD Your dowel maker is somewhat along the lines of L-N dowel plate. I've used mine several times but only by hammering the stock material through the hole. The main problem is keeping it straight as it goes through. Next time I'll try your method of rotating it through.
Brian

 

[JoshD]

Yojeval, interesting to see the LN dowel maker, especially as it ostensibly does 1/8" dowel, the size I was after. I know from experience that dowel this size is super fragile and it's hard to imagine that it would tolerate hammering unless the hole was super sharp and the starting size was close to the target size. But be aware that when you start spinning the dowel through you lose accuracy in sizing. If you need accurate sizing then probably best to make it oversize and sand down to target size by spinning it while holding it with sandpaper.

Fyi, I attach pics of my mark 2 dowel maker: much less likely to break the dowel, I l have managed to make 800mm+ lengths of 3mm dowel with it. It sits on a router table clamped to the fence with a straight bit in the 14mm hole on side E. You spin ~5mm square stock in through the 6mm hole in side A and 3mm dowel emerges from side C. Waste is extracted through the hole in side D.

 

[JoshD]

Very impressive, creative and unique! Well done!!

Thanks!

 

[JoshD]

I'm impressed. My first reaction, I wonder what Steve (blind from birth, whizz braille reader) would make of it!
... Todays short story is.....
I envy your patience with the dowelling jig! Big #fail with some ebony.

It would be great to have a good ebony replacement. Bog oak is lovely and black, but quite coarse grained, not to mention brittle. But ipe is worth a thought, especially if you're willing to do ammonia fuming.

 

[Yojevol]

Yojeval, interesting to see the LN dowel maker, especially as it ostensibly does 1/8" dowel, the size I was after. I know from experience that dowel this size is super fragile and it's hard to imagine that it would tolerate hammering unless the hole was super sharp and the starting size was close to the target size. But be aware that when you start spinning the dowel through you lose accuracy in sizing. If you need accurate sizing then probably best to make it oversize and sand down to target size by spinning it while holding it with sandpaper.

The smallest I've used it for is 6mm. I had a similar requirement to yours on my first clock face but I cheated and used 4mm lollipop sticks. For the same function on my 2nd clock I've used tooth picks which are about 2mm
Brian

 

[JoshD]

You can buy birch dowel ready made in 3mm, also ramin; there's also the option of metal, eg, bronze or copper .... Just editing this after looking at @Yojevol /Brian's amazing clock! I don't think it's quite right for my Scrabble table but bronze or copper rod look very classy set in wood. I also experimented with copper tube: you can stop the end with a little bit of coloured epoxy of you want to colour code your dots.