Flipping through the weekly Rockler e-mail a few months ago, I noticed an ad for template for a set of dominos:
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The set and that box struck a cord with me. My parents play dominos, so I thought this would be a great Christmas gift. The Rockler template for laying out the pips only went to a double six. I wanted a larger set and settled on creating a double twelve, which is 91 dominos total. I liked the contrasting woods for the dominos, so I sought out some 1/8″ walnut and oak to laminate together for the set.
The pieces I ended buying varied in size between the species, so I had to edge glue two pieces of the oak into a larger panel, using two cauls and my parallel clamps:
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I set up the cauls and tightened the clamps ever so slightly on the panels before applying glue. Then I took the oak panels out, applied glue to the edges, and snapped them back into place between the cauls. To keep the panels from bowing back up, I put my jack plane to a new use:
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After getting the oak panel up to sufficient size, I slathered both sides in Titebond II and lined up the walnut boards. I clamped the lamination between two scraps of plywood I had sitting around:
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After some gluing time, I went through the process of getting the lamination dimensioned.
- Joint one side/edge flat on the jointer*
- Rip a parallel edge on the table saw
- Square the end at the mitre saw
* After jointing the first edge on my jointer, I realized that this probably wasn’t the smartest move on a piece that is only 3/8″ wide.
I ran my random orbital sander on each side of the panel through 120 and 180 grit sandings – to prep these surfaces before they got smaller and harder to handle:
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Because of the size that I wanted to make each domino (7/8″” by 1 3/4″Image may be NSFW.
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, so I decided to rip the strips on the bandsaw. This not only was safer, but the kerf on my bandsaw blade is much thinner than the kerf on my tablesaw blade. After ripping the strips to width, I moved the fence and crosscut the strips to final length:
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This left me with 91 domino blanks to use, plus a few extra – just in case something went awry. The next stop was to my pile of sandpaper. I needed to remove saw marks from the sides as well as round all four corners. The results:
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With all my blanks sized and surfaced, I turned to the face layout for each piece. First I measured and marked the center line on each domino, chopping them with a few taps on a 1″ chisel. Next it was on to the pips, where I got my biggest assist from my wife. Not only did she mark all the dominos after I finished chopping the center lines, but she drilled all 1092 pips in the set! Needless to say this project wouldn’t have been finished before Santa’s midnight shimmy without her. A couple coats of shellac later and the set was ready to go:
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Stayed tuned for part two where I delve into the box made to hold the dominos!