I made a Connect Four game

back in 2010 i made a very fun and colorful connect 4 game out of mdf 11 years later i thought it'd be fun to revisit that project and make it again only this time i made an elevated version in woodworking terms that that just means no paint and solid hardwood only this time i used walnut for the game board and maple and walnut for the colored discs not so colorful this time it's elevated by the way if you're looking for a step-by-step approach to learning woodworking from the ground up and maybe even make your own elevated projects you don't need to look any further than the weekend woodworker by online course it'll teach you how to build your first project this weekend no experience necessary and to help you get started i've assembled a free guide to all the tools you'll need and how you can get them for less than a thousand dollars head over to mytoollist.com and download your free guide today it's an elevated guide i think i can make both the front and the back sides using this one piece of walnut board but what i need to do is join two edges together i'm going to have to resaw this down into quarter inch panels of course my blade doesn't go high enough to cut all the way through this in one pass nor would i really want to do that because that would just put a huge strain on that blade and it would have a hard time cutting through that wood so what i'm going to do is just cut through a little bit at a time till i get to about halfway and then i can flip it around and finish up the cut i've got a feather board here to keep this pressed against my fins throughout the whole cut the grain on these two pieces seems to look best when these two edges go together everything just kind of flows naturally so what i want to do is just make sure that i have a nice straight edge to join these together so i'll just quickly joint that on my table saw using the rib fence the important thing here is that my blade is exactly 90 degrees to the table so i'll double check that i can lower this back down [Music] just going to shave the tiniest little bit off of this edge and this edge so they'll fit together nicely [Music] that'll give me a nice seam this is going to be just a real gentle gluing and clamping job here if i tighten these clamps too much these thin boards are just going to bow and they just probably pop right out of those clamps but it doesn't take a lot of glue to hold this edge joint together and it doesn't need a lot of clamping pressure so this is the important part of this glue up is that this is nice and flat [Music] i wanted to take a moment to show you the result of this glue up and how just taking the time to mash the grain of the two pieces that you're going to join together can yield really good results in this case you can't really see the seam there the grain kind of flows together naturally and it looks like one solid piece of lumber so what i'm going to do is just tape these two sides together using double-sided carpet tape okay with those two pieces together now i can square this up to its final size if you want to make this i've got this template you can download it'll just help you set up drilling all of these holes a lot easier what i'm going to do is cut this out to its exact dimensions on that red line just make sure if you print this out that you printed out at you know 100 setting on the pdf that's just something to always double check because sometimes you might have those settings to like shrink to fit your paper and then that's no good i'll use an awl to make a divot in the center of each of these cross hairs i've got a forstner bit in my drill press to drill out all of these holes and i'm using a backer board too just so that the backside doesn't splinter when that bit goes all the way through before separating these two pieces it's a good idea to make a mark there so that you know which way they go back together just to make sure that those holes all line up properly and when you're taking these apart with that carpet tape in there just be really careful because sometimes that carpet tape is pretty strong if you just go and grab these boards like and pull them apart they're probably going to break so i use a putty knife and just try to wedge it in there and just kind of separate that tape from the wood here i'm cutting out some thin pieces to make the dividers between the columns here i've set up a stop block to make these thin strips that way i can just move my rib fence over each time so that they'll all be the same width i think this way is a little bit easier than trying to cut the strips between the saw blade and the rip vent [Music] rather than trying to clamp these small pieces into place i'm just going to put some weight on i taped off all of the areas where i need glue to stick because of all these holes the inside of this game is going to be somewhat visible and i know that that walnut is going to be much darker when i apply a finish so i'm going to go ahead and apply some finish to the inside with that all glued up now i can square up the edges i'm routing out kind of a cove profile around the edge of this board to use as the base i'll just glue this together i cut out some thin strips of walnut and walnut and maple for for the for the discs and to cut out those dips i've got a hole saw here that i've just removed the center drill bit thing you know the pilot hole setter bit i don't know what that's called but it's not in there so hopefully i can just cut discs using that not bad it's definitely going to require sanding oh man this is definitely going to take some time to cut out each of these then i got to sand them all down nice and smooth but there's 42 discs 21 for each color you know the first time i made one of these i just used a dowel and just chopped it up into discs took like two minutes and then just painted them two different colors not this version this version is elevated by the way if you don't have a drill press or a hole saw you just use your 3d printer to make these discs i think i used that joke once before i'm just seeing how i'm just recycling the old jokes too as well as the old projects they're elevated it's an elevated joke this time this is a lot of discs uh

Channel: Steve Ramsey - Woodworking for Mere Mortals

Views: 81,089

Keywords: woodworking, woodworking project, how-to, DIY, easy woodworking, steve ramsey, WWMM, Mere Mortals, The Weekend Woodworker, woodworking plans, Free plans, wood, making, building, makers, hobby, weekend projects, Weekend Woodworker, power tools

Id: b7wqRzfR0UU

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 09 2021