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Notes -
The bargain bin at my local lumberyard was fully stocked this week, so I grabbed two rough planks of Walnut and two rough planks of Hard Maple for $33. I think I paid less than $2 per board foot all told. The walnut is fucking beautiful after it gets milled. My daughter has been begging me to make her a clock like I made for her grandparents last Christmas, so I finally got around to that. Although I kicked it up a notch with some walnut splines which I didn't have the know how, tools, or resources to do last year. In fact, returning to my clock project was rather illuminating.
For starters, I used up some more of the shitty poplar I had purchases at Home Depot of all places. No part of it is quite flat or square. I should have milled it again, but I didn't want to lose even more width or thickness off a relatively meager 3/4" thick, 3-1/2" wide plank. Getting the multitude of 30 degree cuts correct was also much easier with my fancy miter gauge, although I discovered it's probably 0.1-0.2 degrees off. I'm not sure it's worth the effort of recalibrating it, so I'm just going to keep that in mind and compensate when I need the angles to be perfect. Gluing it all up was also much easier when all the pieces are exactly the same shape, versus the frankenstein monster of irregularly eyeballed pieces I had cut last time. Just threw a strap clamp around all of them, and weight them down flat between two heavy objects. Easy peasy.
The splines were new, and I'm not sure I like the method I used. I put together a mostly clamped together jig on my router table, and used a 1/4" up spiral bit to notch out the gaps for the walnut splines. But the jig had too much slop in it, and it wasn't well supported on one side versus the other. So the notches came out ever so slightly irregularly shaped, such that the same thickness of spline didn't quite work for all of them. But I got it close by taking a slightly larger than 1/4" strip of walnut, and then putting it through my thickness planer until it was pretty snug. Then I sanded a bunch of small pieces down until it went each unique notch.
I did two coats of danish oil in the afternoon, and need to wait until at least Wednesday before I do a few coats of shellac, and then probably a few more days before I rub that out and truly finish it with some furniture wax. I did that with my wife's chair and was very happy with the results. Well, except instead of danish oil, I used a stain on hers.
Tomorrow I plan on taking the maple and walnut and making a chessboard out of it. Looks like a fairly straightforward process, so fingers crossed. I won't be staining or oiling any of it, so once it's glued up and sanded, I can move directly to shellac. I'm looking forward to it. If it comes out well I think I have enough lumber on hand to make 2 more and save them as gifts.
Can I buy a chess or go board from you off Etsy
I don't feel confident enough to try to sell my work.
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