Building a DIY Crokinole Board

2020 has been a wild ride and, in an effort to stay sane without being able to go out, my girlfriend and I have been playing a lot more

board

and card games, so I was recently looking for some new games to get into when I stumbled across the

board

. I found a game I had never heard of called croquenol, after watching some videos online I thought I could really get into this so I immediately went out to buy a board and was quickly discouraged to find out that they now cost around 300 for one good quality board. There are some cheaper options available on Amazon, but after reading the descriptions I felt like they probably wouldn't be the best quality, so I figured I have everything I need in the store, so let's go ahead and build one.

I found a couple of youtubers that had some good advice on how to build them better. The game maker's YouTube channel had a great method for

building

a template that helps cut all the rings and drill the peg holes and even had a pdf you can download and print. For his design, his board was the standard all-round board, but I like the aesthetic of some of the octagonal boards I'd seen, so I followed some advice from Tyson on the woodshop geeks channel on how to build the base. I'll link to both types in the description below.

Now let's move on to construction. I started by printing the template design from Games Maker and its layout was made to fit on a legal size sheet of paper that I didn't have on hand. but Adobe Acrobat allows you to print large designs on plain eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper by choosing the poster option. When Games Maker designed this template I was also using a separate template to cut out the diameter of the game board as well as the base, but since I'm making an octagon base I thought I'd add one more location to this template so I can use it for trimming the game board too, so here I'm just adding a mark at 13 and one eighth center because I'm going to use a quarter inch router bit to cut this, so this will give me a board with a diameter of exactly 26 inches for pin locations.

I'm using a 5-16 inch drill because I happen to have these steel locations. pins from my machine shop that I thought would look great, so you'll usually see these boards with brass or wood or sometimes rubber pins in the center, but again I had them on hand and I think they look very well and for the biggest ones. holes I am using a 5 8 inch Forstner bit since I will be using a 5 8 inch guide bushing on my router. Now these two holes here need to be connected and routed, so I'm making some rough lines between them in this section.

The template part is used to make the intersecting lines that divide the four quadrants of the board and I'm using the jigsaw to get close to the line, but not too close because I'm going to use a router to get it perfect. and now it's time to start cutting the plywood. I'm using half inch plywood and cut it to about 27 inches wide, which would give me a little play on both sides when cutting the circle if you're using the method. that the game maker uses, you can actually get four game boards and bases from one sheet of plywood, but in my case, since I'm making an octagon base, I had a little more waste, but I was still able to build two boards and I had some leftover plywood in alligator, its main purpose is to fit the pieces into a small hole in the center of the board that is one inch and 3 8 wide, so here I am using a Forstner bit to start, plus drilling a 5 16 inch hole through the board all the way which I will use with my locating pin to line up my templates later and now we can finally start using the template we built earlier so I use the center locating pin to line everything up and take my Over time and making several passes, I brought the board to its final diameter of 26 inches.

I then put an 8 inch bit in my router and started cutting the concentric circles. Once all the concentric circles were cut, I could move on to drilling the holes for the dowels. in addition to cutting the intersecting lines that make up the four quadrants and the beauty of this template is that you drill the first four holes that I'm drilling about a quarter of an inch into the board and then you use your router to cut the first one. line, then you rotate the jig 90 degrees, which is super easy because you can use the last two holes you drilled to line it up with your dowels.

Now with the template in this alignment you drill the next two holes and cut the intersecting line and simply repeat this two more times using the previously drilled holes to align your template at 90 degree intervals and once you are done you will have the Eight peg holes drilled and the four quadrant lines cut in perfect alignment. At first I thought I was going to fill the align with some epoxy I had, but in the end I just used a little walnut wood filler. I gave it two coats of putty and sanded between each coat and then did a final sanding on the entire board to make sure everything was nice and flat, I put some edge banding around the boards and originally thought I wanted them both to have a band Then I used an anti-static cloth to clean the boards very thoroughly so that no dust remained on them and began applying the last layers of polyurethane.

I think I ended up applying a total of three more coats to each board, scraping them between each one. coat just to make sure I had a nice flat glassy surface, so between the two boards this ended up being a couple of days of applying the poly, letting it dry, scraping, applying another coat over and over again until I was happy with the finished and since I was very excited to try out the game, I gave one of the boards a quick coat of wax and cut a peg to make a temporary game piece and I wasn't very good at it, plus the discs were the only thing that I finished.

I ordered online because I had no desire to make about 50 of these things by hand and they are very cheap online so I will put a link of where I bought them in the description below and now it's time to make the base , so I took them. some of the leftover plywood and cut them into six inch wide strips, then ran them through the miter saw, set my angle at 22 and a half degrees, made my first cut and then measured 12 and three quarters on the long edge and I set up a stop block now I just used the measurements that Tyson was using on the geek woodchop channel and didn't take into account that he used thicker rails on his board and that I could cut a rabbet in them so that my board trench would end up. being a little wider than necessary so in the future I would alter these dimensions a little and make them a little shorter and now I'm ready to put all the pieces together so I grabbed my cookie joiner and made some slits just to help with the alignment and keeping things a little tight while gluing and I just used some painter's tape to hold things together while the glue dried once I had all the pieces glued where I had two halves of the When the base was completed, there was a little gap and that's because a lot of cuts were made on this so it was just a matter of taking it to the miter saw and making small cuts until everything lined up perfectly.

Then I put on some painter's tape. the base and I used this template to line up the top on the base and traced the edge with a pencil then I used an Exacto knife to cut about a half inch inside that line and I just did this so that when I was staining and applying the polyurethane , I wouldn't go too far and have a nice clean surface for the glue to adhere to and now it's time to glue the base on so I grabbed a bunch of clamps put some glue on the base and used my alignment. template to get things pretty close to the center and then just use my tape to check everything again and get everything in order and put all my clamps on and the last thing we need to do is make the rails that go around the outside of the base.

So I took some inch and a half material and cut it down to a quarter inch wide and gave it a quick sand. I set up my miter saw for another 22 and a half degree angle. I made my first cut, lined it up on the board and made a pencil. I marked where I needed to make my second cut and then repeated this across the entire board until I had the complete rail. I did a final clean with an anti-static cloth and two more coats of polyurethane on the rails and the board is ready. I'm really happy with the way they came out, they were a lot of fun to build and the game itself is even more fun.

My girlfriend and I have been playing a ton over the last week and I have to say it's a really fun game. It's very easy to learn and while you can obviously become very skilled at it even at our beginner level, I didn't feel frustrated or angry about a bad move I made or anything like that and I actually got excited. and laugh a lot when my opponent makes a great play so whether you build it or buy it I would definitely recommend getting one of these sets and that concludes this video if you want to see what else I am.

building

in the future, go ahead and subscribe to my channel.

Thank you so much for watching and I'll talk to you next time.