Chinese Checkers!

We had a blast one night on Lac LaRonge lake playing Chinese checkers after a long day of snowmobiling. The problem was that after several cocktails, the marbles on the stamped steel game board would mysteriously move to different positions with a slight bump of the table. I thought there has to be a better way to do this...

So I came up with game pieces that look like this. A peg that goes into a hole. Ingenious right...

So now for the game board. I had some surplus black UHMW, 1" plate in the shop, so that's what I cut the first board out of. I didn't like the result, and it took forever to debur, and still looked bad. Oh well, this board will be good for camping.

 

So off to WindsorPlywood I went in search of a nicer material to use. They had a sale on Jatoba shorts at only $8/board foot. That's a great deal, but they were all narrow boards, so I bought one, jointed and planed it, and this is what it looked like after lamination. The grain matched very nicely.

So on to machining of this piece. I used the CNC router to cut all the cavities, as well as put the rounds on the bottom of the parallelograms.Machining took about an hour.

 

Meanwhile, I was hard at work on the lathe making the 60 aluminum pieces required. Whew, that was alot of pieces, but I had it down to a science after the first 10. I used the ball turner I made to create the entire piece. I would form a piece on one end of aluminum round bar, flip the bar over, make another piece, then cut each piece off using the band saw. Repeat. It took about 5 minutes per piece. When they were all ready, I annodized them and gave sets of 10 pieces different colors.

 

After a good sanding, I finished the board with 4 coats of wipe on polyurethane applied with a foam brush. I love this finish, so easy, and looks incredible. 

 

That's all folks!

If you want the .pdf drawing and .dxf file of the game board, let me know.