I first cut a similar rectangle out of both the dark and the light woods with the table-saw and cross-cut, and used the planer-thicknesser to make the thickess identical.

I then cut the wood into strips on the table-saw, and glued them together in alternating stripes.

Alternating stripes of wood.

I did it in two halves intially, because that was the length of my clamps. Once all eight stripes were glued into a solid piece, I sliced it up the other way on the table saw.

The wood sliced once more.

Then I rotated every other slice 90 degrees and reglued.

Chequer board

Chequer board

The next job will be to add a border and then sand it down and varnish.

I thought this might be an interesting question to examine. I’ve been gathering some Twitter usage data over the last week, and realised I was able to attempt an answer.

Percentage of current MPs on Twitter over time, by party (click the graph to enlarge).

If you can use the joining of Twitter as a rough measure of the uptake of the social media as a whole, then it is clear that the Liberal Democrats are more eager than the Labour Party, while the Conservatives are the most sluggish.

Proportionally, nearly twice as many Liberal Democrat MPs are on Twitter as Conservative MPs. The current proportion of Conservative MPs on Twitter is similar to the Liberal Democrats in September 2009.

I bought a large block of rosewood for a ridiculously small price (£5), which was large enough to make bases for the game and the expansion. I started out by cutting a column from the block on the band-saw, and then cutting it into a hexagon-section on the table saw with its table at 30°.

Hexagonal-sectioned column

I then set the band-saw fence at an appropriate thickness and sliced the column up like a piece of salami.

Stack of hexagons

I then cut the edge shape on the band-saw. I decided to use straight-edged holes and prongs for the jigsaw pieces for simplicity.

Edge shape

This was then sliced to make the six edge pieces and four extension pieces. I removed the jig-saw holes with a chisel, and then sanded each one until the best fit was obtained. Some ended up looser than I wanted, but it was a very difficult thing to be precise about.

The board in plain wood

Extended board

Then I sanded all the pieces, and mounted the cardboard. They were extremely difficult to glue as the card was so warped. I had to clamp the pieces in stacks of six or seven to hold the card against the wood, but the process of clamping invariably caused the card to slip on the wet glue. The best method I found was to let the glue dry half-way, and then clamp.

The finished board

It had its first outing in the back garden. It’s amazing how much wildlife there is around if you look.

Fly on Geranium

Hoverfly

Rose

Geranium

To make it as easy to read as possible, I wanted to ensure there was a lot of contrast between the background and the letters. I’ve carved it from a piece of sycamore, which is a very light-coloured wood, and I’ll paint the letters black.

This is a stop-motion animation of the carving process, taken over a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. When I’ve finished weather-proofing, varnishing and painting, I’ll publish a picture of the final result.

It’s best in HD.