Bingo Board   1                                             9-2021

 

My daughter Angela and her husband Matt like to host a few games of Binger after Easter dinner but the board they have isn't to their liking. I told them I'd make them a new one but would like some input/direction on what they'd want first. A day or two later we had a plan and now it's time to cut some wood.

Bingo Board

I'll be using black walnut and maple for this project, which should look nice together. The size will be 12" tall X 10" wide and each piece of wood will be two inches making up the width.
 

 

 

I fired up my table saw and ripped my pieces two inches wide. And as you can see, I'll be using three pieces of black walnut and two of the maple.
 

 

 

The next step is to glue these five pieces together and to make that happen I'll use my parallel clamps. These clamps have serrations on the working surface which is for the clamping mechanism. To help keep glue out of these serrations, I cover them with painters tape. The next day I removed the work piece along with the tape keeping my clamps glue-free.
 

 

 

I use painters tape all the time but don't buy the cheep stuff, I like to use the 3M brand because it works much better than the other junk.
 

 

 

The next day I ran the board through my planer and cleaned up both sides. Now this surfacing process goes really quick. In fact it took longer to move the machine away from the wall, set it in place, get the dust collection hooked up and then set the correct height than it does to make two or three passes with the unit.
 

 

 

I left a small amount on the length to cut off later, which is what I'm doing here. I used my cross-cut sled for this and again, it took longer to setup than it did to cut both ends of my work piece.
 

 

 

A few minutes with my DA sander had both sides feeling nice and smooth.
 

 

 

Milling Machine

 

I'll be using my milling machine to put in all the pockets for the game balls. To make sure I have each one in the right place I made a cheat-sheet to help me. I'm not sure if you've ever thought about it, but a Bingo game has numbers 1 thru 75 that you play with. That means I'll need to make 75 pockets.
 

 

 

I'm using a 1/2" ball end mill for this and it worked great. So...what do you think so far?
 

 

 

The game balls are 5/8" diameter and with my end mill only being 1/2" diameter, I needed a pocket that was a little bit larger. What I came up with is to use a chamfer tool to make the top portion of the pocket larger, which should keep each ball from accidentally moving if someone bumped the board.
 

 

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