Cribbage Board Series - Design Work

Woohoo!!! Put me on the list please :). I would love to make one. I have one but it’s bulky. It does its job but yours looks sooooooooo much better!

Thanks.

@Merick01 thank you for sharing your work on YouTube and then sharing your hard work in Fusion360 with us here. This build was a fun project and I look forward to making another one with all the things I learned from it to improve the process and results. This first one I made for my father’s birthday which is fast approaching.

















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:raised_hands::raised_hands::raised_hands::beers::beers::beers: Super awesome Brock!

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Makes me want to learn cribbage

It’s actually not a difficult game to learn. My grandfather taught me when I was a young kid…come to think of it he also taught me many woodworking skills in his basement shop when I was a kid! Oh how I miss those days!

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Cribbage is definitely a very fun and easy game to learn. Learning it from your grandfather is a great lasting memory. My very first epoxy inlay was on a board I made. Definitely nothing as fantastic and elaborate as yours. Very well done!

For pricing, here are my recommendations:

  • Material (Cost + some mark-up. Minimum 30%, but depending on amount of material used, up to Will’s 400%). I would include epoxies & finishes here.

  • Consumables, this can be tricky, but if you use up a full bit (or multiple bits) on a custom job, definitely include that cost. If you are getting hundreds of jobs out of a bit, your shop time or material mark-up might be where you factor that in (as opposed to a separate line item)

  • Shop time (at an hourly rate), this may be less for CNC vs you actually hand finishing/gluing, etc, but something you’ll need to work out for yourself. This also depends on what you decide your time is worth. If anything I would have one rate for production work (ie you got multiple cribbage boards done as a batch) vs a higher rate for custom work(one-off/commissioned). This shop rate should be enough to cover small percentage of minor consumables, overhead (ie electricity) ect.

  • Office/Design time. This is a bigger deal on custom/one-off/commissioned work as you’ll have more design time (likely) for a single pc. Whereas on stuff you doing a production run, the amount of time spend on design divided by the # of items makes it a much smaller impact (in the final #). One way to deal with is to neglect design time on production items, but increase the mark-up on the material (to cover your overhead). Also you may decide to use the same value for office/design as for shop and just use one rate for all time you have in the project.

Alternatively, at my current job certain aspects of the job are based off a SQ-FT & Linear-FT costs (rather than time), others on a per item cost (cutouts for sinks/outlets, etc) & still yet others based off of an hourly rate (usually travel time or extra expected time for installs). However, all that being said as someone else mentioned their “profit” on custom jobs is maybe $2.00/hr which is a reminder that there is a limit to what the market will bear. This requires some market research on what similar items are selling for.

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I am not making cribbage boards but some jewelry boxes for a craft fair. I went to etsy to find comparable boxes and it went from $39.00-$1000.00. Some of the cheaper boxes I don’t know how they make any profit. They must be mass produced by slave labor. I settled on $200.00 due to being a craft fair. As you said the market can only bear so much regardless of my costs. That makes people make cheap stuff with only profit in mind. Maybe it sells but I didn’t want to make crap.

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@MicSquared 100% agree.

What I’m finding is a painful amount of extra factors that can really could break the bank. I’ve been working on a project over the last month, using extremely expensive materials, a ton of work hours, just to almost reach the end result of finishing, to have a critical step fail and ruin the project.

I’ve always been able to find work arounds or fix small mistakes to save a project, but it’s becoming almost impossible to do that with more complex projects. A lot of time, no fail procedures that sometimes is almost a chance of luck if it works or not.

$400 worth of materials down the drain this week because i used a dye to color glue darker, which bled through all the painstakingly veneer inlays I worked on for the last week🔥, which didn’t hit the top layer and only surfaced once I starting doing my final sanding.

One needs to account for this if dealing with custom, exquisite projects as a business, especially if the margins are super thin.

I’m in the hole on this one, but that’s the price I and the customer will pay for wanting something unique and not mass produced.

I’m inlaying veneer tonight :disappointed:

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Bummer :frowning: Unfortunately mistakes happen, hopefully you have some good take aways to help avoid similar situations in the future.