New Live-Edge Cribbage Boards

I’ve been quietly working on a bunch of cribbage boards this year, including a complete custom board with the longest list of requirements I’ve seen that took about 6 weeks to design. If you have an idea for a custom cribbage board, let me know!

This weekend, I put the finishing touches on a batch of 7 live-edge cribbage boards including one of the curviest boards I’ve ever made and a couple of the largest I’ve made.

My process of making cribbage boards starts with me standing over a downed tree (fallen by a storm or removed for some reason – never cut down for the wood) and deciding where I can get the most interesting cribbage boards. I cut the tree into lengths and bring them back to my shop for processing. I resaw the small logs into boards with my bandsaw and let them air dry for usually two years or more. Once dry, I plane them, giving me the first true look at the actual surface of the cribbage board. Then I lay out the hole patterns, carefully following the live edge and drill the holes. I prefer to layout three tracks, but sometimes there is room for only two. I have also been asked to make the odd board with four tracks. If there is room, I add a scoreboard.

I like making use of crotches where a branch… um… branches out from the main part of the board. The branch makes the shape much more visually interesting and provides some different design options. And, if the board is not too wide, it fits in my standard cribbage board shipping boxes. Here’s an example – Cribbage Board #68 from my latest batch.

Here’s another crotch piece with some really neat figure that I used for Cribbage Board #70. The part of the wood that continued straight was quite narrow, so if the track went down that section, it would require a tight hairpin to get back out. I usually try to avoid sharp corners as it makes the alignment between the tracks look odd. So, for this one, I chose to place the scoring field there instead.

Usually when I cut a log into cribbage boards, I get 2-4 from the same section of log, depending on how thick the log is and what defects are present. I got two boards out of this section and Cribbage Board #69 is the other product. You can tell by the shape, colouring and grain that these two boards came from the same section of log. But they are not identical in shape. You can see that both legs are nice and wide, with lots of room to make sweeping corners. But, the heart of the tree shows in this board as dark lines that I didn’t wish to cross. So, instead, I ran the track around three sides of the board and placed the scoreboard opposite the end of the track.

Head on over to my Cribbage Boards page to see everything from this batch, and other available cribbage boards. Each one comes with high-quality metal pegs made in the USA from copper, stainless steel, and black steel. As always, they ship free across Canada and USA.