Carrom Board, Building an Indian Game

In this instructable I want to show you how to build a Carrom Game. Of course there are several ways to do it, but i figured out a technique how all the parts fit well together when being assembled (if you have professional tool you may skip some steps...).

shopping list:

- A square wooden plate with one nice surface (for optical reasons). Should be around 15 to 20 mm thick (0.6 - 0.8 inch), the thiker the better. the measures you have to sample from the image below, the lateral length "L" has to be L = a + b + a (if you wanna take my measures it´s 1134mm)
- 4 wooden strips of hardwood (e.g. beech) for the frame, and again, the harder the better. measures are (length, width, height) 969 x 60 x 20 mm. If you don´t have very accurate tools, leave them a few cm longer.
- 4 pieces of woodenplate for the corners, if possible as thick as the frame strips, measures 110 x 110 x 20 mm.
- Transparent Paint and paint rollers for a smooth surface. Use hard paint like parquet floor paint. you will need around 4 layers ( = 4 square meters).
- Eddings, a long ruler and compass for the marks.
- Sandpaper (120, 320, 600, 1000).
- hole saw, diameter 45mm
- different tools you should find in your workshop.
-4 decorative strips as wide as the thickness of the corner plate + baseplate (40mm). length around 1200mm, thickness 10mm

Step 1: Drilling the Corner Holes

place one corner plate in each corner and fix it with a clamp (image 2).
Now flip the whole board and fix the plates with at least three srews. Now you can remove the clamps.
Flip the board again and set markers for the corner holes 82.5mm from the edges. the blue-framed square on image 3 is the corner plate.
Drill the hole with the hole saw through both the corner plate and the base plate. You can now remove the corner plates for the following steps (hint: mark the corner plate and the corner it belongs to, it´s worth a lot!)

Step 2: Shaping the Corner Plates

So we have for square plates with a hole in it. what we want is square plates, where in one corner 1/4 of a circle is missing.
So take the buzz saw and make 2 cuts as seen on image 1, again 82.5 mm from the edges.

Step 3: Shaping the Frame Strips

Assemble the corner plates, each in their corner and measure the distance between them. You will notice different distances (1-2mm). that´s why you should have left the frame strips a little longer, so you can now shorten them to the exact length you measured (hint: as before, mark the frame strip and the side it belongs to).
When every strip hast it´s exact length, clamp them on their places, flip the board and fix them with screws, at least 5 screws per strip, I suggest.

Step 4:

So that was the easy part!
Now it comes to the fine tuning, determinating the quality of the board´s surface. Start sanding the surface with the 120 Sandpaper, continue with the 320. When the surface feels nice and smooth it´s time for the first paint layer.
Always put one layer of paint on the board before you put the marks on, because the ink of the Eddings would spread in the wood fibres and look ugly!!
Clean the surface from dust and talc (you brought it on the board with your fingers), Stir up the paint and put on a constant layer.
Let it dry for 1 night and sand it with the 640 sandpaper, untill ich feels smooth. I suggest a large sanding block (image 1).
Now clean the surface again and put the marks on. Take the measures from the image in step 1.
After finishing continue with layers of paint, as much as you think it needs. Always one layer, drying, sanding. You will have a very even surface.
The last thing to do is to assemble the decorative strips around the frame. The easiest way is to screw the strips with fine screws. more elegant is gluing.

And now get a striker and some Carrom pieces and start flipping!