Tablero da Gucci

As of late I have been rather obsessed with a game called Tablero, In case you have never heard of it, its a drinking game that was developed in the S.C,A, that is played with seven shot glasses and a 7x7 checkered board. The board is one square shorter on each side than a standard checkered board. Since my obsession has gotten the best of me I have decided to start making boards to play with during this years pirate event season, which is coming up rather quickly. I wanted a to make a few boards and I wanted them to stand up to the torturous use they will have to endure during an average event. So of course wood is the most logical material.
So I started my first attempt with a 1x6 and cut to be even on both sides.

Once I had two pieces to work with I decided to cut two more since I had the word. Figured if I can make two boards to start with. Once I had all 4 boards I clamped them together so i could line up the wholes to be drilled for dowel rods to help glue the boards together.

Using a strait edge I drew three lines across all four boards. Then using my eyeball since I am lazy and I hate myself, I found the relative center of each board on the line and drew a dot. From there I drilled a whole the same size as the diameter of the dowel rod. Cutting off chunks of dowel I glued the boards together and then clamped them.

Then it was time to let this dry for about thirty minutes, but making sure to wipe off any excess glue from both sides as I went. On one of the boards it wanted to buckle as the clamp was being pressed. This was from drilling out the wholes to big, When this happened I just placed something heavy on the board to keep it from happening while it dried.

Thirty minutes later I examined the boards and found that my eyeballing method made life a lot harder. The seams on one edge didn't line up correctly. So now it was off to Home Depot to get a planer. While I was there I picked up just about every grit of sand paper for my sander. Now since I eyeballed those dowel hole I had to plane off quite a few layers of word to make the seams match.

After finishing planing I then sanded the whole board top and bottom till everything was was evened out. Then using my table router I routed the edge of the board to give it a nice rounded edge. Then I continued to sand the board till everything was even smother and ready to be stained. The next step though was to Dremel the board with the squares. After banging my head on the table a few times i figured out the proper layout to maximize the space and have even squares. I drew these out in pencil on the board so that i could follow them with the Dremel.

 

As you can see the Dremel and I had a few fights during this process. I eventually got down the correct way to handle that little machine and make it my bitch, but not before it took a few good nicks out of my board.
At this point it was time to put the project down for the night.