And I'm back for the new year!
SERIOUSLY. GET THE FUCK OUT, 2020.
Anyways.
I did have one Christmas project this year. And only one because hot DAMN was it a doozy.
Long post coming.
So, a while back my dad rented a huge cabin in the mountains and my brothers and I spent a fairly pleasant weekend getting shitfaced in the mountains with family. It was great. And one of my brothers had a friend that had built this really great game that was basically an oversized version of Battleship with boats big enough to put shot glasses on, and instead of marking a hit on your own ship with a peg, you drink the shot. It looked something like this:
These are not pictures of my brother's, this is one I found online.
So one afternoon in the cabin, Stu and I wanted to do something on our own, so we went into the other room and set this up and played. It was a ton of fun! Just a fun drinking game that he and I could do on our own, I loved it. And I had the thought that this would be perfect for Matt and Cari who do like to have date nights on their own with drinking games and just hanging out together. And that idea just sort of hovered in the back of my head.
This year, I decided that this was the best idea I had for Matt and Cari. Everyone is staying home and hanging out there anyways, it seemed to make sense.
At first I toyed with the idea of just buying one for them. I am a level ZERO woodworker, so despite the fact that I thought I probably could make it, buying it would be easier. But daaaaaaaaamn are these expensive. I get it though, I appreciate the work and quality of handmade stuff. It just wasn't in my budget. I did find a plastic set that I thought about but it was missing some of the features I wanted, like actual physical boats, and the ability to pack all the pieces into itself for storage. And the shipping was absurdly expensive. So after many debates with myself, I decided it was time to start leveling up my woodworking skill.
And because I'm a crazy person, I decided to make a set for Stu and I at the same time. Sighhhhhhhh.
For reference, I took my plans from a combination of things, pictures and DIY instructions from other people's versions, various youtube videos, and this instructable:
https://www.instructables.com/Battleshots/
I was not following a step by step tutorial because none of the step by step tutorials had exactly the design I wanted. So I was just going for it.
So first, to supplies. Lowe's, take my money.
Based on the instructable doing the work for me, I knew I wanted 2' square side and center panels so that I could make a 10x10 grid of 2" squares for the game board with space on the sides for the letters and numbers.
I bought a large board of I believe it was maple plywood, 8' by 4', 1/2" thick, and had the nice people at Lowe's cut it into 2' squares for me. The downside of this is the cuts were a bit rough, some splintering on the edges, probably due to a combination of me using plywood and Lowe's just not going to do all the extra techniques needed to prevent that for a service they provide for free to everyone, but I just didn't have the budget for fancier wood. And it was nice to have the option for them to cut the board for me, it was a huge board and I had not yet worked up the nerve to use the table saw my stepdad had left for me in the garage when we bought our house. I'd just sand it a bit and try not to worry about it too much.
A little math will tell you that the board divided into 8 squares, which was more than I needed, I only needed 3 for each set, two side panels and a center panel.(Keep in mind as I continue to describe this, I'm doubling everything since I'm making two at once.)
I also bought 6 4 foot long 3/4" thick pine boards to serve as the frame for the center panel. Two boards would be cut in half to exactly 2 feet long to be the top and bottom of the frame, and the other boards would be cut to 2 feet plus the thickness of the top and bottom frame pieces and would be the side frame pieces. The leftover wood from those boards would be cut into smaller pieces for the boats, which I'll go into later.
Hardware was pretty straightforward too, I bought some brass hinges, two for each side, some latches to hold the side panels up and closed for storage, and a handle for each of them to go on top for transportation. I originally planned to cut grooves in the frame pieces with my router that I would fit the center panel into and then screw the frame pieces in, and I already had wood screws. (This plan would change.) I also picked up some wood stain in Golden Oak and some polycrylic spray for a top coat.
These supplies just cover the body of the game board, there were still some accessories needed, wooden pegs and shot glasses, but those wouldn't be needed until later.
The shot glasses I got were just a 60 pack of hard plastic 2 oz glasses I found on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NCRJSP6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
(Obviously 60 for each set, 120 total. More than necessary, useful if one gets broken or thrown away.)
Also, I'm gonna warn you right now, I don't have as many pictures of this whole process as I wish I did. Much like my Xena costume, some things were just too hands on to take pictures, and I was working so hard I just didn't think of it.
So first of all, my big square panels needed sanding. I have a power sander, some time out on my spiffy new work bench is all I needed to get everything smooth and nice. I tried to clean up the splintery edges with minor success, but in the end I'm just too much of a newbie woodworker to worry too much about that. Maybe later when I'm more experienced I'll care more about splintery cuts.
Once the sanding was done, I needed to trace out my grids since that needed to be done before assembly. That was just an immensely tedious process of measuring and drawing out a 10x10 grid on each board, and on front and back of the center panels. I left about a centimeter of space from the edge on the bottom and the right side, leaving wider gaps on the top and left sides where the letters and numbers for labelling the columns and rows would go.
Seriously. It was just line after line after line using a yardstick for a straight line. I also drew diagonal lines through the squares in the center panels intending to use those to mark the centers for the holes I'd need to drill for pegs to mark hits and misses. I drew them on with pencil, intending to wood burn them in and just erase extra pencil marks. I had no intention of trying to use a router to carve the lines like others have done, as all I have is a little baby trim router with none of the accessories and attachments needed to draw straight lines inside a panel of wood like that. Not happening. But I was pretty okay with a wood burner. I thought.
FORESHADOWING. BUM BUM BUUUUUUUUUUUM.
So I get my lines all sketched. And I start wood burning. Right away it's not going well. Predictably I can't draw lines nearly as straight as I'd like, and I keep letting the edge of the burner touch the wood burning extra crosswise marks and also it's taking a lot of effort because it seems like I have to push surprisingly hard to get a good mark despite giving it plenty of time to heat up. I know how to use my wood burner, guys.
And then. As I'm about a third of the way down my third line on my first panel, the tip of my wood burner abruptly snaps off. It doesn't do any additional damage to the panel, thank god, but the second half of the tip is left inside the burner, making my wood burner essentially useless. But with how badly it was going, it's hard to see that as the worst thing ever, aside from the irritation of figuring out what to do now, oh, and also my wood burner is probably ruined since I doubt I'll be able to get that out. Whatever. I have more pressing concerns. Like figuring out how I'm going to get these lines permanently on here.
Next, I try using a small paintbrush to just freehand trace my pencil lines. HAHAHAHA I can't believe what a bad idea that was. Have I met me? Have I noticed my absurdly shaking hands and utter lack of ability to draw a straight line? Yeah, fuck that.
Next, I tried laying down two pieces of painter's tape on either side of the pencil line and painting over that. That had a slightly better result, but the paint still bled under the tape, creating an uneven spiky edge. And most likely would have had all kinds of impossible difficulties to do crisscrossed lines. Still not gonna work.
In the end, I had to take the option I was trying to avoid because it felt unprofessional and I was somewhat worried about how it would react to staining over. Sharpies. That's right. I resorted to grabbing my yardstick again and tracing over my pencil marks with sharpies. It was the only way to get a clean straight line. I had a little bit of ink bleed in the wood grain, but not much, you have to know it's there and go looking for it to see it. Also, drawing on wood with sharpies just ate through them, I used up like 4 or 5 to do all the panels. But it worked. I traced over my wood burned lines and painted lines with the sharpie too, so I was able to clean up some of the messiness from painting and they didn't look too different from the rest of the lines.
The next step was drilling the holes in the center panels for the pegs. I originally bought some 3/4" pegs, thinking it would be fun to have some really oversized pegs, but my biggest drill bit was a bit too big for them and the next size down was too small. I had no wish to buy a new drill bit just for this, so I exchanged the pegs for 1/4" pegs, which I did have in a matching drill bit.
Pegs I ended up using are here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019EIEN60/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I had to order 2, each set needed 300 pegs. But we're not going into the pegs yet.
First of all, I realized my diagonal lines were not really marking the exact center of my squares due to the fact that my 2" squares were not exact, so I had no use for all the diagonal lines I had drawn. I used up like half an eraser removing those lines and made such a mess on the carpet with eraser flakes. And then I needed to find a new way to mark the centers.
I solved this by cutting out a 2" square of paper, folding it diagonally and then diagonally again and snipping off just the tip of the triangle that formed to perfectly cut a hole in the middle of the square.
I unfolded it and then used that as a template, carefully lined up the paper square on the grid square and marked the center through the hole. Four. Hundred. Times.
Seriously. That's how many squares needed their centers marked. 10x10 grid, 100 squares for a single grid, one grid on either side of the center panel, 2 center panels. 400 squares total.
At this point I also stained the center panels. This was very unwise. I figured the hole drilling wouldn't affect the surface and I wanted to get it out of the way. This was not the right time to do this, but the theory was it would be easier to stain before assembly, and I planned to paint the letters and numbers on with regular acrylic paint, which I was not sure would do well under the repetitive wiping action of staining wood. So I went with it. I also figured I could do it indoors rather than out in the garage if I put down some plastic. The center panels I did one per evening, the fumes were unpleasant but not that strong.
But the next stage. The next stage after that was even better. I had to take a screwdriver and dig a little divot in each of those little center marks, because if I didn't, then when I went to drill the holes my drill bit would shift and skitter a bit on the surface of the wood and result in the hole not being drilled exactly where I wanted it.
There MUST be a tool that makes this easier. There MUST BE. Because this was easily the most miserable step of the whole damn process and it took me two nights to get it done, with intense hand and wrist and shoulder pain from pressing the screwdriver into the wood, not to mention the blister on the palm of my hand despite the fact that I wore work gloves. I swear to all the gods, I will locate an easier way to do this before I ever take on a project like this again. It was awful, and I was in pain and exhausted for like a week.
At the same time, I decided to stain all four side panels at once. Indoors. (THIS WAS UNWISE. DO NOT DO THIS. I AM VERY DUMB. THE FUMES WERE SO. SO. BAD.)
Basically I set up my kitchen table as my staining area and I would alternate between putting stain on the boards and going and digging some divots in the center panels. It made for some long evenings. So on top of the arm pain from the divots I also had a headache from the fumes because, fun fact, my living room is not adequately ventilated for something like that. Not in the winter when I can't open my doors and windows or anything. I will not make that mistake again.
These pictures were obviously taken a while after I was done staining, thus the no plastic sheet underneath.
I also learned that, unprofessional as it might be, paper towels actually worked really well for applying the stain the way I wanted it. I could slop it on with the paper towel and then just keep rubbing and it would soak up the excess, leaving me not having to worry about a stack of stain soaked rags or having to clean out a paint brush with mineral spirits. I'm sure there's all sorts of things wrong with this technique and every real woodworker that reads this wants me dead now, but in the end I was happy with how it turned out, and that's what really matters.
By the way, if you're curious, each panel got two coats of stain. Initially.
Also the stain didn't bother the sharpie lines at all. Not even a little bit. My worry was for nothing. And if drawing on wood with sharpies didn't just eat them up I would have continued to use sharpies for the rest of the designs, but man I struggled to get solid dark lines when all the sharpies wanted to do was dry out. Most of those lines required me to trace back and forth multiple times to get it dark enough. Doing that for the larger designs I needed to make would have been time consuming and frustrating. Of course, painting them was too, so there was really no winning for me.
After this I took a weekend off. God, I was tired from all that. But then I had to get back to work and actually drill the holes in the center panels.
So, this step terrified me. The boards were 1/2" thick and I needed to make sure I did not accidentally drill all the way through to the other side even once in the 400 holes I needed to drill or it would probably ruin the board, while still making sure the holes were deep enough to hold the pegs. So, 400 1/4" holes, without messing up. Geeeeeez.
And then I learned about drill stops. Basically a metal ring that has a little set screw I can screw onto a drill bit to stop it from going any deeper. Perfect!
I got a set from Lowe's for like $7, even more perfect.
Except not so much. It worked great for about 15 holes and then all the sudden it completely came loose. Luckily I caught what was happening before it went all the way through or I would have been extremely upset. And then after that I could not get the drill stop to fix in place again, every time I tested it on some scrap wood it would slip again. Clearly these things could not be trusted. And if they couldn't be trusted they would not be used, I couldn't afford to slip up. They got returned to the store.
After much research I realized my only other options were to buy a drill press, which I would have loved an excuse to do, I really want one, but MONEY, or to go the old school route of wrapping my drill bit in masking tape at the depth I wanted. And wouldn't you know it, that worked flawlessly. I had to replace the tape every 50 holes or so because it would get pushed back a bit, but since I was drilling 1/4" deep holes I had a little leeway. Not much, but enough. And once the tape was in place I could just fly through drilling the holes. Seriously, I didn't even have to let the bit completely stop spinning before moving to the next one since it would just rest perfectly in the little divots I'd dug and drill exactly where and as deep as I wanted. This step was actually crazy easy once I had all the setup done. Worst part is that my arm would get a little tired from holding my drill. Easy fuckin' peasy.
However, I had been incorrect in my assumption that the drilling would not affect the surface, I definitely had multiple drilled holes that tore up the surface around the hole a bit that I was going to need to do something about.
Once the drilling was done, I had to lightly sand the tops of the holes so they wouldn't be rough and to clean up the torn out bits a little, and then I restained just around the holes to fix the torn out and sanded coloring. Basically this consisted of dipping some q-tips into the stain so I could stain the inside of the drilled holes, and the excess stain around the edges would hit the sanded torn out parts, then I would wipe off the excess with a paper towel. It worked fairly well. The center panels looked slightly darker than the side panels now, but not too badly.
So next up was the letters and numbers on the grid. Obviously that couldn't be done after assembly. My plan was stencils and acrylic paint. I had a surprisingly hard time finding the right stencil in the right size, but then I found this at Walmart:
2" tall letters, nice military looking block letters, perfect!
Wait, 2" tall? Sure, that's the same height as my squares, it makes sense.
No wait, exactly 2" tall? Yeah, you know what happens if I try to stack 2" tall letters in a column with exactly 2" of height available for each letter?
This:
Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhh that's not gonna work. I needed smaller letters.
Now, at this point I was starting to feel a bit of a time crunch. We were going to be visiting Stu's parents for Christmas and I assumed I'd be doing my gift exchange with my friends pretty soon after we got back so I wanted to be done before we left and we didn't have a lot of time. So rather than order a new stencil and wait a few days I ran to Joann's where I was able to find this:
It was.... fine, I guess. Not a fancy scrolly font, if not as nice and military blocky as my first choice. But the letters were 1 1/2" tall. Much better. And I didn't have time to be picky.
So I started with the side panels, I drew out some grids in the empty spaces on each panel marking out centers and edges so I could perfectly center and line up my numbers and letters, which was a couple of night's project on it's own. Then I lined up my stencils and with a foam spouncer brush painted in the letters and numbers. That is a deceptively simple sentence for what a chore that was. I rotated through each letter on each panel to allow time for the paint on the previously painted letters to dry, and after each letter was painted I'd have to take a few minutes to clean up the edges with a small paint brush, because the edges were never clean, and I'd also have to clean up paint that bled under the stencil, which was just a nightmare.
I hated using stencils. It was the. Worst. It was messy and difficult to get it looking nice and I hated it. If I ever do this again I'm gonna use stickers or stamps or something. No more stencils. I'd really really really have loved to do it in sharpie, if getting a solid black sharpie mark wasn't so difficult. But I did eventually get it done. I did the center panels next, just the same process.
Once that was done, I needed to erase all the grid lines I'd drawn on. Got to work on the side panels, everything erased like it should. Got to the center panels...... and suddenly my eraser was powerless. It just. Did nothing. The pencil lines mocked my eraser as I struggled.
I honestly don't know what happened. The center panels had had stain put on more recently, but it had still been a day or so since then so the stain was dry. I did use a different pencil, maybe that was it? Regardless, I could not erase those pencil lines on the center panels. I immediately panicked. I googled and tried different things and in the end, the only thing that worked was magic eraser. So I was relieved. For about two minutes, until the panels started to dry, and for some reason the places where I had used the magic eraser were taking on a greyish hue. I just... I just couldn't win.
It honestly wasn't a terrible color, if what I wanted was a nice aged barnwood color, this might have been a miraculous discovery. But it wasn't. And I didn't want to magic eraser the whole thing to make the color match because I didn't want to take the grid lines off and have to redo it. I was also struggling to get the pencil lines close to the letters without removing the paint. The magic eraser does not discriminate, it takes everything. So in the end I just had to magic eraser over the whole area with the letters and numbers and just surrender to erasing them and redoing them, and then staining over that section again and hoping it would blend. It was so frustrating. I did make myself a full stencil of the letters and numbers by cutting up the stencils, lining them up on the painted letters and taping them together so that when I went to repaint them I could do it all at once instead of one letter at a time, which did help, but I was still annoyed.
Here, you can see on the far right a side panel with its original two coats of stain undisturbed, on the far left a center panel with it's holes drilled and restained and the pencil marks still present, and in the center, the pencil marks magic erasered away, letters and numbers repainted, and magic erasered area restained. It's not terrible, really, but I was disappointed. That side panel is exactly how I wanted it to look and I love it and there was just no way to get the center panels to look like that without sanding everything off and restarting, and even that wasn't a guarantee. The stain could have soaked in too far, it could require so much sanding I end up wearing through the top layer of wood, it would probably prove impossible to perfectly line up my grid lines over the drilled holes again, it just wasn't reasonable. So we had to push forward.
I also had a minor issue with the painted letters and numbers leaving a faint shadow behind in the wood grain and my premade stencil didn't 100% line up with the original letter placement, so some of the repainted letters have shadows. But again, no reasonable way to fix it, moving on.
Also, I would like to point out as time went on the stain did lighten and even out, apparently it takes time for the stain to really settle into it's final color. So if those seem a little blotchy, don't worry, they even out a bit. You'll see that in later pictures.
So. At this point I have done everything I can for the panels. I now have to move on to the frame pieces for assembly that I have been putting off because I finally have to use my table saw to cut to boards to the correct length. I was very very scared of the table saw. Table saws are intimidating, man.
But wait! There was one more way to procrastinate!
Like I said previously, my plan was to router some grooves down the middle of the boards to fit the center panel into like a puzzle piece. Of course, now I realize what a difficult proposition this was, but at the time it seemed doable. I had a little guide that came with my trim router, I could totally do this.
So I get everything set up, my board clamped, my guide positioned and my depth set, I start cutting into the board and it goes great...... for about a foot and a half. And then my router just lost it's damn mind and it's grip on the router bit.
You can see I tried to router in from the other side hoping to straighten out the bad cut and didn't even make it to the first cut before it went bad.
I checked and basically the router bit was straight up slipping out of its holder. I don't know if it's the fault of the bit or the router but I'm inclined to blame the bit, it came with the router, and a nicer separately purchased bit I used for a different project never had this issue. But also the router is supposed to hold onto the bit, so maybe I'm wrong. Regardless. This was a bad plan and not going to fly. The board was ruined for it's intended purpose, but could still be cut into boats, so not a total loss.
Regardless, my plans needed revamped. I didn't like the idea of just screwing the frame pieces flat to the panels, it seemed insecure. So I researched some wood jointing methods and came upon doweling, drilling holes into both pieces and connecting them with a wooden dowel glued in. Still somewhat difficult to get lined up holes but probably within my reach.
Right around this time however, I realized I had another problem. My frame boards were 3/4" thick and my panel boards were 1/2" thick. This meant that when I attached the side pieces with hinges, the thickness of the bottom frame piece would hold the side panel up about 1/4" off the ground, resulting in strain on the hinges, probably leading to things getting broken. I needed to lower the bottom board. I decided to do this by routering a ledge on the long edge of the bottom board that I could fit the hinges onto and would be set to the same thickness of the side panel. The router bit I needed for this was the nicer one I bought, so cutting that proved to be easy enough. The router bit wouldn't go in quite far enough for the width of the hinges, but I figured I could just dremel out the rest of the space for the hinges later.
(Yes, NOW I know what a bad idea that was, but we haven't gotten to the part where I realize that yet. I had a lot of not realizing my idea wasn't going to work in this project.)
Anyways. I was officially out of ways to procrastinate using the table saw. Time to toughen up and stop being a baby.
I watched a bunch of beginner videos, and went and played with all the parts of the saw, and I bought myself a set of various push stick/handles to push wood through a saw while keeping my hands far away.
This set, specifically.
I realized pretty quickly that this saw is old enough to be my grandfather and has basically none of the safety features or functions newer saws have. I briefly looked into adding a splitter or riving knife, but this saw is so old and unique, it would have been very difficult to do, requiring custom made parts I had neither the skill or tools to do. So I decided to just go for it. Aaaaaaaand maybe look into buying a newer saw sometime in the future.
One of the other features this saw is missing is the ability to raise and lower the blade, or if it does have that I can't find it. Luckily it's current set height is exactly perfect for 3/4" boards, just barely breaks the surface.
So, I marked my cuts, put on my ear and eye protection, turned on the saw, and went for it.
In the end, it was surprisingly easy. I push the wood through slow and steady with a firm hand on the push sticks or miter gauge and I never ever ever ever reach across the blade until it has 100% stopped. Honestly, it was so simple and easy I felt rather foolish for how scared I'd been. I kept all my fingers and everything was fine. And now I'm not afraid of it anymore and can use it whenever I want!
So I cut the routered edge board in half, that was exactly 2 feet long, a perfect fit for the bottom frame piece. I cut a plain board in half as well for the top pieces. For the side pieces I cut them 2 feet plus 1 1/2" (3/4 for top frame piece and 3/4 for bottom frame piece) but because of the board my router had ruined I had to sort of splice two pieces together for one side piece, I no longer had enough boards to make all the side pieces one continuous piece. So I measured and cut the pieces for those, I would dowel them together, but I wasn't done cutting pieces yet.
I also wanted to cut my boat pieces here. I needed a 5 square boat, a 4 square boat, 2 3 square boats and a 2 square boat for each side, so multiply that by 4, 2 sets for each game I was making. One square is 2 inches, so each boat was 2 inches wide and 10, 8, 6 and 4 inches long respectively. Luckily the width of my pine boards was such that I could cut 2 inches from either side on the ruined board and completely remove my bad router cut so it still made perfect boats. Cutting out so many smaller rectangles took some time but really wasn't difficult, as long as I carefully lined up my cuts. I got pretty good at estimating where the kerf of the blade would be so my cuts were basically perfectly placed. I got a great deal of satisfaction from stacking my boats on top of each other and feeling how perfectly the edges lined up.
So next was joining the pieces of the one side frame piece. I did some research on doweling, I had thought I would be able to just figure out the hole placement but quickly became convinced I wanted a doweling jig, so I could just avoid the heartache of misaligned dowel holes altogether. Or as much as possible at least.
Due to cost, and again, time, I wanted something I could just run out and pick up. I got this from Lowe's:
Now, the reviews on this are not great. But as a baby woodworker who doesn't know any better, I can say it did the job and worked well enough for me. I was able to make reasonably well lined up straight holes. And it comes with dowels and glue and brad tipped drill bits and doweling centers and even drill stops, although after my last experience with those I didn't use them, I just sorta felt out the depth. I also bought some additional dowels from the hardware store for attaching, I wanted longer ones for this and didn't want to get into my game piece pegs.
Don't..... don't try and figure out what I spent on this project. I certainly don't want to know. And it's not like I was done yet.
Anyways. That doweling jig, low tier that it might be, gave me the ability to reliably make matching, perfectly centered dowel holes in my pieces. I just followed the instructions that came with it, it wasn't hard. The joined side piece was just two pegs, and the center panels were 5 pegs per side, with two in the ends of the pieces to join it there. There were a lot of points that needed to be perfectly lined up so all the pegs would fit in their hole. Intense attention to detail needed. I won't bore you with the details of doweling, its just mark and line up and drill over and over and over again. Lots of dry fitting to make sure my pegs were lined up, a few instances of refilling holes with wood filler and redoing it because sometimes I'm just bad, it was tedious but in the end successful. If you want more doweling tutorial information, do a google search. I'm too much of a newbie, you don't want my inexperienced advice. My best advice is don't even try without a jig. Seriously. I'd have ruined my wood and my sanity without it. Also, based on how useful that was I'll definitely get a nicer one someday.
So, in the process of this I attempted to start carving out the space for the hinges in my bottom boards and decided basically at once I didn't want to do that. It was gonna be time consuming and difficult and cause alignment issues at the top edge and I just didn't wanna. I got the serious feeling that my plan just wasn't going to work the way I wanted it to, so I bailed. I took one of my extra 2' panels and basically cut new bottom frame boards out of it so that the bottom piece was the same thickness as the panel pieces. I think that saved me a lot of trouble. The edge routered boards were now no use to me, but I'm sure I'll find something for them someday. It also meant slightly trimming the side pieces due to the now thinner bottom piece, but that was dummy easy now that I wasn't scared of the table saw anymore.
It was so very profoundly satisfying when the pieces fit together right.
See? You can see how the stain has evened out a bit after several days. And that has just continued to improve over time.
So now that that drilling was done, I could stain the boards, after my previous experience I waited longer to stain and DEFINITELY did that out in the garage. No more indoor fumes for me thank you.
Before gluing it together I also needed to attach the handle to the top piece. It was going to go in the center of the board obviously, which meant that it would need to be in place before securing the panels, the panel would go right over the screws. I used my dremel to carve out some cavities for the screws in the top of the center panels so the screws wouldn't prevent the board from being flush. I really ought to get myself some countersink drill bits. Other than that it was just standard handle installation. Measure to center, drill holes, tighten screws.
Next came gluing. I knew I needed corner clamps to brace the joints as the glue dried, so you know, one more thing for me to buy. Well, four, actually, for each corner. Oh well, I guess I'm building a tool collection at least. I just got some basic cheap ones from Lowe's, nothing fancy. I didn't want to buy eight clamps, so I could only glue one set at a time. I slathered the pegs and board edges in glue, fit everything together with the help of a rubber mallet and a refusal to be defied, and clamped everything in place.
I had one minor piece of drama when I was assembling these. The pieced together side frame piece did not want to fit on it's pegs, and in the process of hammering it into place the joint actually split open as it settled onto it's pegs. Just a little, but you can see the gap. I wonder if it's because I used the glue that came with my doweling jig for this seam? Maybe that's just really cheap glue, that's quite likely. All the rest of my seams were done with Gorilla Glue wood glue.
Basically I just dumped as much wood glue as I could shove into that little crack and I'm sorta depending on all the other pegs to keep things together. It's not a pretty seam, but Stu says it adds character and I should stop worrying about it. WHICH I'M DEFINITELY NOT DOING.
While this was drying I had other things to work on. My boats needed their shot glass holes drilled and the side panels needed some decoration.
First, the boats. The bottom of my shot glasses were 1 1/4" across, but I wanted it slightly larger in case of other shot glasses being used. Luckily I had some time ago bought some spade drill bits for drilling large holes and I had one that was 1 1/2" across. So basically I just divided the boats into their 2 inch squares, marked the centers of that and then drilled shallow holes. My paper template from marking the drill holes on the center panels was useful here.
It was a bit rough, sometimes the bit caught and tore the wood on the edges, and I had to be very careful to hold the drill firmly and straight to get even holes. This took a little time but really wasn't too hard. And interestingly enough, the long point of the spade bit makes a hole that you could put a peg into, if you wanted to play normally. Not intentional, but convenient.
I also wanted to trim the corners off the fronts to make them at least vaguely boat shaped. I made a basic template that I cut the corner off so I could mark all corners I wanted cut off the same. Stu got me a jigsaw for my birthday that was the perfect tool for trimming those corners off, so that was easy enough. I then sanded the hell out of them, rounding all the corners and cleaning out rough drill holes as much as I could. Painting would come later, I had other things I wanted to do first.
I had some decoration I wanted to add to the side panels that would be visible on the outside when it was put away, basically just add a title, "BATTLESHOTS" and a picture of a battleship.
For the battleship I just got a silhouette of a ship printed off, taped it to some posterboard and cut it out with an xacto knife to make a stencil.
Greaaaaat more stenciling.
I drew some more grid lines on the backs of the center panels, switching back to the original pencil I was able to erase to be safe, and making sure to flip the grid side upside down so the design would be right side up when it was closed. Then it was just the same as before, line up stencils and paint. I was able to use the original stencil I bought for this, since I had plenty of space for bigger letters. I had the same stenciling drama I had before, bleeding paint and rough edges that needed to be cleaned up, but I made it through.
And in case you were wondering, these pencil lines erased just fine. I bet it was just the different pencil I used.
Next up was the pegs. I needed red and white pegs and a way to store them.
I played with some painting ideas, but I was really worried about paint adding a layer that would make it hard for pegs to fit in the holes, and the holes just scraping the paint off the pegs. After some research I found that RIT fabric dye can be used to stain wood. This also somewhat worried me because I knew pegs expand when wet, but after experimenting on some extra pegs it seemed they wouldn't expand too much or just went back down to size after drying. After my experience with doweling the frame pieces together I knew that sometimes those pegs could be a tight freaking fit. I even experimented by dumping some beer on my test pegs and seeing if the color would bleed, and found that it didn't, really, unless I let it sit for a while. So that was good to know, in case drunk people spill beer on a drinking game.
So I took a bottle of red RIT dye, mixed it in an old Folgers coffee container with a basically full kettle of boiling water and dropped in 200 of my pegs. I planned on each side getting 50 red pegs. (I'm accounting for lost pegs. You never know.) It took about five minutes in that bath to get a nice rich red. I pulled them out, rinsed them in cold water and laid them out on paper towels to dry for like two days. I decided not to worry about the white pegs being white, they would just stay their light wood color and that would be close enough. Each side would get 100 of those, so I had 400 plain pegs left.
For storage of the pegs, I bought some dollar store gift card gift boxes, scraped the glitter off the design on top and made a divider out of some cardboard that I glued in. I would just paint these to match the boats.
It was at this point I ran out of time. It was time to leave for our Christmas trip. I spent the whole week trying not to think about it, although we had some beautiful weather. I love going south for Christmas.
We had a very nice Christmas.
Stu got me the greatest gift. He actually commissioned some art for me!
Loooooooooook! It's meeeeeeee! As a cute anime girl in my favorite Sailor Moon outfit!
The artist is on instagram, her work and the post are here:
You might remember I actually cosplayed this outfit in a previous post long ago:
Right here, if you want to see the post
I love it so much. That outfit actually got ruined in the wash, I should redo it. I still love it just as much as I always did. And I could probably do a better job now.
Anyways, when we got back I had to hurry and finish up before time to actually give the gift.
I started with painting. I will say, one of the handiest things I've ever bought I picked up years ago was a trigger spray handle for spray paint cans. I don't have to break my finger holding down the nozzle, I clip this to the top, point it like a gun, pull the trigger and spray.
First, the boats and boxes. Shannon gave me the idea to do the boats in black and gold, for Matt and Cari's college colors. But first I wanted a primer to help with some of the roughness in the wood, and to cover the designs on the boxes.
I used a nice spray filler primer, two coats to try and smooth things, but I wasn't planning to spend a lot of time sanding for perfection. They're just platforms for the shot glasses after all. But the primer helped.
Obviously I did all the spray painting out in the garage. I stored all my paint out there as well. So the next day I went out, primer was dry, and I started spraying the black paint for the first half of the boats. And it slid right off like I was spraying vegetable oil. A sticky mess and an empty can of spray paint later, I do some research and realize there's a goddamn reason why spray paint has recommended temperatures. The cold in the garage basically destroyed the paint's ability to stick. Fucking duh.
So I bought more paint and stored everything indoors to keep it warm. I then took the boats and paint out to the garage, laid them out on a large sheet of cardboard, sprayed the paint and then brought them inside to dry. Doing this made the gold boats and boxes turn out beautifully, I had more struggles with the black, the previous coats wanted to crackle and needed to be wiped off and sticky puddles of too thick paint made for a somewhat uneven finish. I was worried the paint would never cure and would remain sticky, but luckily that didn't happen, it just took a few days to dry properly. The black boats aren't perfect, but they serve their purpose. They just have a little extra texture.
You don't get pictures of the black ones cuz I didn't take any pictures of them.
All the wood pieces got sprayed with a polycrylic top coat in satin finish, I had no desire to make it glossy, but I did want to protect the paint. Easy enough. I covered the handles in foil to keep the paint off it, that didn't need a top coat, took all the pieces out to the garage and sprayed it down. I left the pieces not assembled to spray so I didn't have to worry about protecting the hinges and latches from paint.
It was when I went to attach the pieces that I realized I had a problem. The top of my side panels were going to line up with the top of the center panel, not the top frame piece, which meant I was not going to have a flat surface to attach the parts of my latches to. So I had to cut out some small blocks of wood that I attached with a single dowel to the top center of the side panels so it would be flush with the top of the frame and give me a place to attach the latches. Any future versions will take this into account and the side panels will be sized to fit the center panel and the frame.
Once I had the side panels attached with the hinges, which was a simple as marking the placement and screwing them in, my little wooden rectangles actually ended up being a little too tall due to the lift of the hinges, so I had to shave them down with a box cutter, but that worked well enough. I also learned the importance of drilling pilot holes, I didn't do them in the first set and when I screwed the latch hook on it split the wood a bit so I had to douse it in wood glue and clamp it for a day to seal that crack up.
The latches were a bit difficult to position, they needed to be a little further in than perfectly aligned so there would be tension on the latch when it was closed. It's not complicated, just fiddly.
I also should have offset the latches from the handle, it makes it somewhat difficult to hold the handle. Not impossible though. Just something I didn't anticipate. I didn't think about how much space towards the handle they would need. Maybe a different type of latch would be better, but this was what I could buy at my local hardware store. And I was unmotivated to go all over town looking for different latches.
I typed up some custom rules for the game. Not so much for the game, not many people don't know how to play Battleship, more to specify the drinking rules. Those are here, if you want them:
( I can get you a text doc with the rules if you want it, if you're making your own, this is just how I did it for display purposes.)
And with that.... I was done.
It was a little strange to be done. This project took a lot of time and concentration and honestly, making two at once was just the worst idea, although I'm not sad to have my own set. I gave Matt and Cari their set, and they loved it and have already played with it, so I feel like my effort was justified.
Cari's set in action.
All in all, I learned an awful lot, and gained some new tools and skills. I can now use my table saw and I learned doweling and used my jigsaw. I love stuff like this, learning new skills and making things. I might even consider making more of these if someone asks me real nice...
I'm probably at least a level 1 or 2 woodworker now.
