Thread: Would Thos. Chippendale have made mahjong boards?

My sister put in a request for some mahjong boards. I thought that sounded interesting 'til I looked them up on the web & saw it wouldn't have challenged me that much when I was 12 yrs old! But this is the level of requests I get from my family these days..

The longest part of the job was scrabbling in the wood stash for suitable scraps, and figuring out the right sequence to make the 4 cuts safely to form the two rebates. The front rebate is sloped & there is a square rebate on the top of the board, so I needed to cut in the right order to keep the workpiece supported & have the waste drop away from the saw at the end of the cut. Anyway, it all went as planned, & as I started cleaning up the cuts, it occurred to me that I could at least turn the job into a drive-by gloat when I noticed every tool I used except the tablesaw & my Record #7, was a tool I'd made: making mahjong bds.jpg

A tiny sliding bevel, small trysquare, two marking gauges, A shoulder plane, a #3-sized smoother, & my little "badger" plane. The badger was particularly handy because it has a cap-iron & can handle reversed grain very well, so I was able to plane in any direction without having to reverse the piece. It produced a finish-ready surface off-plane (well plenty good enough for a mahjong tile holder).

I certainly didn't have those tools when I was 12, so I guess the job would have taken me a lot longer back then....

Cheers,