I have been thinking about what I could build for my 10 year old daughter for Christmas. She enjoys board games like Monopoly and Clue, so I thought I would build a fancy board game box to hold a Monopoly set with a drawer to keep all the money, cards, and game pieces organized. I looked at the others posted on LJ and a few other places on the web for inspiration and I played around with a few designs of my own in SketchUp.
As with most things I draw in SketchUp, I was spending so much time on it, that I thought I had better get out to the garage and start cutting some wood or I will never finish in time for Christmas Eve.
My first step was to make a full sized template out of 1/4” MDF to sketch out a few ideas for the top of the box and I decided that it should double as as Checker/Chess board.
I’m just winging this project based on the wood I have on hand. I thought some Pau Ferro (Bolivian Rosewood) for the dark, and Ash for the light squares would look nice and I had a couple boards of each with some nice grain.
I was able to finish cutting out all of the squares for the playing surface this evening. The checkerboard surface measures 20” x 20” (the size of a standard Monopoly game board). It is made of 64 2.5” squares. I laid it out on top of my template before I called it a night:
I’m planning on adding a picture frame style border to bring final dimensions of the top to 24” x 24” which will give the the room I need to store the game pieces underneath (I hope. I still have some measuring to do before I build the box and drawers).
Once I finish the top, I’m going to try my hand at building the box with dovetail joints (another first for me). I’m also thinking about adding two drawers on opposite sides, one for the Monopoly set, and one for the checkers/ chess pieces.
I’ll post an update over the weekend as I make more design decisions. Who knows, I may even put legs on this and turn it into a table if I have enough time.
Regards,
Jeff
Crafty Puzzles
