Some good friends of ours are turning 50 and Mrs. McGinty suggested some corn hole boards. Who doesn’t love holding an alcoholic beverage in one hand and tossing a bean bag into a hole 30 feet away until someone scores 21 or you both are too drunk to remember the score (my preferred way to play). Corn hole boards are easily made with a 2 foot by 4 foot piece of plywood. Or is it 2 feet by 4 feet? I say “foot” in this case, but would say “feet” when referring to an individual side – “it’s 4 feet long this way, and 2 feet long this way.” Maybe if we went to the metric system this wouldn’t be an issue. Where was I? Oh yeah, then you use 2x4s for the frame and to prop it up so that it’s 12 inches high in the back. I don’t know if you have followed the price of limber lately but the materials needed to make two cornhole boards would have cost tens of thousands of dollars (probably). So I went to my scrap wood pile.

One of my first projects was a patio dining table out of cypress. I over estimated how much wood I needed and was left with a 14 foot long 1×10, a couple of 42 inch long 1x10s, and some various other pieces. I had enough to build one out of cypress but not two. I was off to the lumber yard for some cypress when Mrs. McGinty says “maybe you could use some of your other scrap pieces and make it work without buying more wood?” Challenge accepted. 

I realized that if I cut the boards down into 3 inch strips about 20 inches long, and then ripped those in half to 3/8ths thick I would have enough surface area for two boards if I glued the strips to some plywood. Fortunately I had some shitty B/C (or worse?) plywood that was in the way. So I cut it down to two pieces, each 2 feet by 4 feet. Feet seems to work better here than foot. Anyway, after piling up the boards I noticed that some of them have some nice grain details. Cypress tends to have interesting and boring wood grain details, often in the same board. So I laid out the boards in a mirror image chevron pattern where each cornhole board would have a mix of interesting and boring wood grain –

This picture is before I realized I should do the mirror image, so I spent a few minutes trying to match up the boards after mixing them up. The blue chalk line is the center of the board.

Then I cut a 45 degree miter in each end and lined them up to see how it would look –

Very nice! Now to glue them down. I used a straight piece of primered trim to line everything up, spread a bunch of glue on the plywood, then set each board down using a speed square to help with the 45 degree alignment. I keep a bunch of weight lifting plates around to help hold pieces of wood together where clamps won’t do, and used an old shelf that had poly on it so the glue wouldn’t stick –

I was able to match up the mitered ends pretty well with minimal gap between each piece –

After a couple of weeks of gluing (had to do the smaller pieces for the corners separately) I had two cornhole boards. I trimmed off the excess with my track saw and made extra effort to get everything square –

The next step was to mount some boards along the side. I didn’t have enough cypress for this so I used some 1×3 select grade pine. In order to make it more rigid, I cut a rabbet around the edge of the cornhole boards and a matching dado lengthwise along the pine –

I bought a set of Freud dado blades and I was super-impressed with how smooth the cut quality was. The glue spot is from a screw hole where I had used the plywood for a previous project. Like my dad used to say, “it’s still good!”

Here are the sides getting glued up –

The hole for the bean bags is 6 inches across, and is 9 inches down from the top and 12 inches in. I don’t have a drill press to make this so I bought a 6 inch hole saw bit and decided to do it free hand. I already had a pilot bit so I just bought the hole saw bit. Here’s a handy tip for you: the pilot bits vary among manufacturers –

This one (DeWalt) was short and wandered a little when I tried to make the hole. The one I should have used (Milwaukee) was a quarter inch longer –

There’s a “size matters” or “just the tip” joke in there somewhere. The shorter DeWalt pilot bit did work on one hole oddly enough, but wandered a little on the second hole –

I was pretty livid after this since it’s basically done and sanded smooth. I don’t remember cypress wood being so “white” either? Is it racist? Anyway, this close-up of the wood grain looks great and it really came out how I was hoping. I swapped out the pilot bit and drilled the hole and while the above picture looks nasty, it really wasn’t bad once the hole was cut. I looked at it for some time, then decided I would do a ¼ inch round over with my router and sand any remaining blemishes. The router took care of pretty much all of it, and after a little hand sanding touch ups here is what it looked like –

Can’t even tell and crisis averted! Next came 4 coats of flat finish poly (maybe 5? I lost count), sanding between coats to make it as smooth as possible. I thought about a coat of paste wax to make it slick but the flat sheen was very smooth. The final product, complete with folding legs attached with lag bolts and wing nuts so they can tighten the legs without tools –

I thought the cypress wood would finish more orangy-brown but this looks good. I think the chevron pattern was a design win, and even acts as a target line when we tested them out at the birthday party. 

I also worked on this at the same time –

It’s 3 drawers to go under the right side of my table saw, made with all scrap wood from a back porch we had built last fall. They were just going to throw it away so I went and grabbed all of the useful pieces, which was a lot. The drawer front was made with one sheet of plywood so the grain matches up, and the rest is just glued up mortise and tenon joinery, rabbets, and dadoes for the panel sides. I used heavy duty drawer slides so I should hold all of my tools that I want to put in them. I have a bit of a storage and organization problem.

The end.