Dominos & Domino Boxes

At work we sometimes play dominos during breaks & lunch. When one of my friends decided to retire I decided to purchase the Rockler domino template set & make him a set of dominos for his send-off. Dominos need to have a wood with a pretty plain figure for the back side. It can make the dominos look a bit plain but good domino players would be able to use the fancy figure of a high dollar piece of wood as a “tell” & could read what dominos are left in the boneyard & what dominos their opponent holds. I chose walnut as the base wood milled it to thickness & laminated some nice bright birch to it for the face side. After attaching the templates I marked the lines for cutting out the dominos & drilled the “pips” (the dots). Now I removed the templates & cut out the dominos, sanded & finished them with clear satin laquer. The combination of walnut & birch made a nice contrast for the pips.

The first box I made was from scratch & was made out of walnut. I milled some more walnut, used rabbet joints & carved my friend’s name into the sliding top. Later I used the plans that Rockler provides for free with the domino templates to make more boxes. The plans call for “box joints” so I set up my Craftsman box joint guide & my Freud box joint blade set & made several more boxes. (Once a set-up for box joints is made is fast & easy to just keep making boxes.) I milled some more walnut for the box portion & used walnut, cherry & maple for the sliding tops. So far some of the boxes are unfinished & some have been finished with the same clear laquer.

-- Frank, Florissant, Missouri "The New Show-Me Woodshop"