Here’s the picture. I was inspired by a nice looking piece of wenge to make it from that. And I’m testing some white oak and maple today for steam bending. The inside will be a nice light colored wood with visible grain.

I haven’t spaced out the drill holes in the scoring section, but otherwise the rest is nearly correct. There will be no text on the board that says start or finish or numbers. I’m not going to make a solid piece for the inlay, I will be using thinner pieces and glueing them up. I’m thinking a nice touch may be to have a very thin strip of wenge in between each track… we’ll see.

I think I read everything on the internet about steam boxes before I did this, and I still didn’t learn it all. I figured bending will be the most difficult thing about this, so better get started on it early. I still haven’t finalized the design, but I’m going to start playing with bending wood.

I had a rough idea of what I wanted in my mind (A good steam box for $0). Almost, but not quite. I tried real hard looking around at scraps of things but just couldn’t get what I wanted. So I made a trip to Totem and picked up some 4” PVC (I wanted it big enough for whatever project I worked on) and a few other doo-dads. Here they are in all their glory.

The first challenge which I knew was coming, was how to get my fitting for the small hose in the hole I drilled in the Pipe, but from the INSIDE. Here you can see it, now how to get it out?

I got it lined up just right using gravity, and then an “L” shaped hook off my pegboard style toolwall did the trick to get it through.

After that, I cut a hole in the $20 kettle from Zellers (like Walmart) and put the same fitting in. All I had to do now was connect my hose with a couple of hose clamps, and this thing was never coming apart. Add to that a little silicone around the kettle hole and I thought I’d get lots of steam up into my chamber.

Well, let’s just say more steam was coming out of the power-cord opening than there was going up my spout. I think the 3/4” hose was a bit too tiny. I also would have had better success with a higher quality kettle. This thing leaks steam like you wouldn’t believe. It comes out of the power switch, by the power-cord, absolutely everywhere! So after a good 20 minutes, my temperature wasn’t going past 160F. Perfect for nice side of ham, but not so good for a long piece of oak.

Back to Totem! This time to buy a much larger connecting pipe. And I did. I bought a 2” pipe to go from the kettle to the steam box, and a proper 4” to 2” adapter. I didn’t want to have to try and connect the two pipes myself. At this point my steam box is no longer cheap:

Materials Round 1: ~$20
Kettle: $20
new pipe and fitting $20.
That’s $60 for a bunch of plastic and wires….

So I put it all together, and cut a new hole in my kettle. The plastic is really brittle and difficult to cut without the right tools, so I used side cutters and a tile chipper. Next time I’ll heat a knife and cut it. Here it is in all it’s glory!

This time it cracked the 160F mark and went beyond. Too bad my temperature gauge is so horrible. I keep having to tap it to get it to move. But it looks like all will be well. Next up, some bending!

Anyways, I’m looking for some advice here:

The first picture is the ‘left hand’ side of the crack or whatever it is. It’s not as bad, but the right hand side of this same anomaly is the next pictures. This is one of the fir sides. I’m not sure how to deal with this. It doesn’t really like to push in with hand strength on the right side. I wonder if there is sawdust jammed in there. If I Was going to paint this, I’d chip the piece out and fill it with epoxy, but I’d like to keep a nice wood finish. The only possible solution I can think of is to put in some sort of a decorative inlay – and match it on both sides. I don’t even know what happened. It’s been sitting up in the rafters of shed for months waiting for more time. I wonder if it came because of the stress on the fir from being curved?

So any advice would be appreciated.

So now the question is, how difficult will this be? I’d like the grain to follow the track, and so will need to bend the wood to follow the contour of the track – I’d prefer this over cutting the track shape out from a solid piece. I have a little bit of experience shaping wood by glueing up into it’s desired form, so I think I would go this route over steaming. Although, I may need to steam this anyways first to get some bend and relieve some pressure .

I’m going for a board about 24” long. I’d like it a little bigger than a standard board so that as my dad ages, he can continue to use it regardless of eyesight or fine motor skills. This makes it around 7 inches wide (Although I may make the border wider to reduce delicate areas.

My thought was to build up a jig and maybe make each track of a few pieces. The smallest inside diameter would be 1.1 inches – is this doable? I’m not sure how I would keep the pieces flat as I glue them if they are inlay thin. Clamping may be really tough as well. Perhaps make them from a thicker stock and then cut the stock down – leaving me an inlay for 2 or 3 cribbage boards? How would I cut that shape down? I think a table saw would be too powerful. I’d need to fill in the gaps before doing this. It may be safer on a bandsaw, but I don’t have one.

I’ve never done inlays but they really intrigue me. I certainly plan on practicing a bit first. So if you have any advice or design suggestions, I’d be happy to hear it.

One more thing. To keep the proportions relative, I would need to make it thicker overall. I think I’d make a base thick enough to store a deck of cards. Maybe the base would slide open or something. This idea is still brewing….

A couple of friends and myself decided to build our own DN ice boats sometime last year. I’ve already got one that I purchased a couple of years ago, but that’s only have the fun! So we got together and saved a bunch of time by make a little production run of 6 or 7 boats. One of my friends used to work in his Dad’s Cabinet Making shop and has access to some very large machines, so we went in on the weekend to do some joining and planing. We cut out enough parts for all the boats and then spent a long time gluing. There are no fasteners used, everything is epoxied. So we split up once that was done. That means I had a boat that needed some trimming on the skinned marine plywood and then will requite a lot of cleanup of the epoxy and sanding. It’s been in this state for about 18 months now I think. I’d like to use it this winter and have the money to buy the sailboat parts (or I did…), so I figured I’d get on it.

For your reference, here’s a couple of links to learn about the DN ice boat.
Ice Boats in Gener – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_boat
DN History – http://www.idniyra.org/articles/dnstory.htm
Video from Our 2005-2006 season – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTVsxIc4-bg

I’ll give more detail as I remember it in future blog posts on this boat. In these pics I’ve just started trimming and cleaning up the sides.