My oh my, what have we here? Crokinole!

Anyone want to take a guess at what's underneath the plunge router in this photo of my son's high school shop?

I'll give you a hint -- I want one, a lot, and there's about a dozen more blanks in a pile on the table in the foreground.

I'm stumped. Is it the image of Christ I'm supposed to be looking for or a pony?

No, it's appropriate for the category I've selected, and for this web site.

Crokinole board? Sex doll? Counterfeit wooden nickels?

stormseeker75 wrote: Crokinole board?

Bingo. My boy is there building a robot but the board had the circle and quarter lines sketched on it that let me sniff out what it was. I asked the shop teacher who was building the Crokinole boards and he looked surprised. He asked if I wanted to order one and I said yes, and he was even more surprised at that. He said it's the first time anyone had ever taken him up on ordering a shop project! So I wrote up an order form for one before he changed his mind.

No one here has heard of it. The teacher stumbled on Mayday's web site and saw it and figured it was in reach of high school students, so he wrote up the specs and assigned it to them. May not end up being Helinski quality, but damn, having a board custom-made locally is seriously cool.

S.

That's really cool. Being able to support the shop program is a bonus too.

Wow. Very sweeeeeet!

Finally, a decent monolith marker for Nexus Ops!

Sagrilarus wrote: He asked if I wanted to order one and I said yes, and he was even more surprised at that. He said it's the first time anyone had ever taken him up on ordering a shop project! So I wrote up an order form for one before he changed his mind.

S.

Let me know the price, and if it's under a hundred dollars, sign me up. I can paypal you that plus shipping immediately. This would make one hell of a Christmas gift, primarily because of the story.

Agreed with what Pete said. I would love to have one and to support your son's shop class is a superb bonus.

This score/pieces box is pretty nice. Price is a little steep, but you need pucks anyway.

www.michaudtoys.org/games.html

I dunno, the cribbage boards are quite nice and very reasonably priced...

Gary Say wrote:

I dunno, the cribbage boards are quite nice and very reasonably priced...

You're right.

My board came with disks and a box that was fine, but if I was in a disk-and-box-replacing mode, the one I pointed out would be an improvement.

Got a chance to get back in the shop, where the sample version of the project was sitting in the wood shed for review by the students. This is the first copy produced by one of the shop teachers on the same toolset. A better craftsman for sure, but a first run through the process. This is it:

Not a very hi-rez image, so I'll give you the low-down. It is obviously a hand-crafted board, with places where the stain did not stick, and the outside edge of the round playing field has a bit of a ripple to it where the spin of the router wasn't perfectly true. There's the center drill hole in the middle of the goal (something I've seen in production boards as well and really doesn't matter) but the overall appearance and surface is very nice. One drawback -- it is frikkin' fast as hell. My first three shots put the puck in the gutter on the far side of the board! The teacher that was present indicated that the owner waxed it on a regular basis. I don't generally plan to be sober enough to play on a board that slick.

Pieces in the shop are proceeding, including the underlying plywood beneath the playing surface:

The boards in the back are the outside rails stained to an earthy purple color, so it appears each board will have a different color scheme.

There was a piece missing in the design -- no hook on the back of the board to hang it when not in use. I mentioned that to the teacher on hand (whose parents are Canadian ex-pats and hadn't had any experience with the game prior to this shop project) and he almost literally banged his hand on his forehead. "I was trying to figure out where I was going to store the damn thing." I listed off the reqs for him, inset, centered to match any image laid onto the board. It should be in the final products.

If the project boards are in the neighborhood if the quality of this board shown above I've got one hell of a Christmas gift coming. The teacher indicated that many of the students are remedials, gifted physically but not terribly interested in school work (even the shop work) but that he was confident I'd get a good quality board. He said that when they were asked about the bulk order for pucks (which would cost the kids maybe $5 per set) only about half the kids raised their hands, indicating that they had no intention of keeping the projects or playing them if they do. They may end up in the local Goodwills and I'd be curious to see where they price out. I raised the idea of perhaps inspiring the students with a measurable, green-colored indication of the value of their work, and the teacher on hand said he would be curious to see what the result of that would be. Naturally there's no way to predict quality or consistency on the products, but I may find myself in the position of reviewing a number of boards and purchasing them for various values. I would have a body of inventory for sale, and then would have to figure out how to ship the damn things. Shipping these things is not a trivial business -- may sell locally only. That would mean getting into the gaming business.

On that note, I just called Perry Cock's bluff at Multi-Man on Warriors of Japan. I may be the proud owner of 70 copies at wholesale, zero shipping costs. I can't help but think this would be a bad idea. I'd have to figure out how to ship those damn things too. I'd have to work up a business plan and total-cost analysis and consider putting them up on Kickstarter as a sale-by-proxy for Multi-Man, skimming a few dollars off of each sale on the way by.

I woke up to a normal day off. Remarkable what 12 hours can bring.

S.

very nice, as a follow up you could get them to do a Carrom board (the Indian style, not the American one)