Backgammon anyone?
Do you have any good buddies that you’ve never met? I do. The Internet has spawned a whole new way of enjoying friendships and my buddy, Pat Roberson and I write regularly about what we’re doing and want to do with our miniatures projects.
Anyway, she mentioned that she wanted to build a game table but that she didn’t want it to be a chess board. I suggested that we each build one “together”, though we’re thousands of miles apart. We passed some game table photos back and forth, brainstorming the idea. As I’m on a SketchUp kick right now, when I saw a small photo of a backgammon table in a Virginia Merril book, I started drawing. Here’s what I came up with. I get giddy every time I open and close the drawers in SketchUp. And yes, you CAN do that but it’s best not giggle at your laptop monitor like I do.
I learned a lot while doing this and Pat likes the design so we’ll probably build them in 1/12 scale. You’ll notice that a lot of the wood-grain goes in the wrong direction. I hadn’t learned how to orient it while I was drawing so I didn’t worry about it.

I also played around with a free image rendering program called Kerkythea that works well with SketchUp. I don’t really know what I’m doing and there are a gazillion settings you use to tweak your images but I was pretty impressed with this result.
Cheers — Larry




Full Chisel Blog
Logan Cabinet Shoppe
Renaissance Woodworker
Tom Fidgen's Made By Hand
Village Carpenter
Wood Whisperer
Fine Woodworking Magazine
Popular Woodworking Magazine
Wood’n Bits
Wow! Just friggin’ wow! If this is what happens when you live sorta in nowhere where you can’t really communicate with the locals so your are sorta isolated, then when is the next train go ing to nowhere? Bummer about the wood grain but the drawing is really, really cool!
Doug
Would love to have you living in Quebec City, Doug, but the job market is no better here than in Texas
As for the wood-grain, it’s easy enough to re-orient but the truth is, it’s better to turn off the color if you’re going to build from the drawing anyway.
Cheers — Larry