Poker Chip Case #1: VT's Poker Case

Here is my next project. I have been following Bob Babcock and company’s blog “Design. Click. Build.” on how to use Sketchup over at www.finewoodworking.com . I love working in Sketchup and this seemed like a good piece of software (since it was free and is relatively easy to learn) to design a case for my poker chips.

My buds and wife and I have been playing poker on a semi-regular basis, and for whatever reason, it seems like we bought the chips. We got them on sale and they are in those spinning octagons.

Those are fine if they stay on a shelf and only get brought out at home. The problem is that we end up going over to the other players’ houses for the most part so that no one has to host the game all the time. This leads to us bringing the two spindles over in their cardboard boxes and the chips inevitably fall all over the place and that just drives me nuts. So, I says to myself, “Self, you need to make some cool looking box to hold the chips. This is a perfect opportunity to build your skills in wood and on your computer.” I spent a long time designing the case after looking all over the place for examples (there are very few of those out there, by the way). Part of the length of time had to do with how busy I was at the end of the school year (I am a High school teacher by day, and the student government advisor to boot so the end of the school year is my busiest time of year and I had very little time in the shop in April and May). I was also delayed in the building of this by a month long vacation to Europe with my wife. We hit 6 countries and had a blast. If you want to read our travel journal (my wife did all the work on this, she loves the Yahoo travel), just click on the link below

http://travel.yahoo.com/trip-view-1085877-europe_adventure;_ylt=AtnsNYud_Q6_g053B26K9_KfItAF

If that doesn’t work, just go to the travel section of Yahoo.com and search for Team VT, that’s us.

Well, now that I have cleaned up the sketchup file and put dimensions on it for my own use, I thought I would actually start a blog on building this poker chip case. The textures in the picture are just approximations of what I wanted it to look like. I have a chunk of 8/4 maple that I plan on resawing into the sides, but I hadn’t actually bought the wood for the contrasting color until just recently. I found some nice Padauk with a good reddish color to use for the contrasting color. The colors of the school that I work at are Red and White and since most of the people who play poker with us are teachers at my school, I thought it would be appropriate to try to get something close.

I didn’t feel up to actually drawing in the hardware and handle yet, but I intend to pick something up when I get to that point. I have also been toying with hand chopping dovetails instead of the finger joints that I had originally intended. We shall see, I need to practice those before I make that decision…though I did just pick up a nice Japanese saw or two at Wood craft to cut dovetails…hmmm.

I will be milling up the stock in the next couple of days and I will post pictures as I go as I think I am about at the place where I can actually blog about my work. It also helps that I have all this free time, at least until the beginning of the school year.