[Richard]

Hi,

I have made a backgammon set, using resin for the board & for the men.
In both cases, it took several attempts to get the results I wanted.

For the men, I initally thought of using a silicon biscuit mold, but that would mean pouring 15 times exactly the same amount of resin to get the same height. Not humanly possible! Also the top edge would have a meniscus, which would have to be removed.

The solution was to cast several bars of resin (sparkly green, & sparkly blue) in 15cm lengths of polypropylene pipe – resin doesn’t stick to PP :-).
This was 32mm diameter water pipe from the hardware store. You can also get plugs for this tubing, which saves trying to tape over the end.
Fix the tubes vertical, pour your resin & wait for it to set + 24 hours. Using short lengths of tube reduces the quantity of resin, & reduces the heat, which can (will!) cause some bubbles.

You may need help with this next part. I used a table saw set up to slice the tubes into 10mm lengths.
Keep the pieces in the PP pipe slices for the moment.
Once you’ve done this, you can see if there are any bubbles. In my case, the blue “men” were bubble-free, not so the green,
where a huge bubble had formed on one side thru the whole bar! No problem, we can fix that by sticking a piece of clear packing tape over one side of the piece, then filling the holes with a few drops of resin.

When everything is set, you can knock the resin out of the bits of tubing & choose the worst-looking surface to be treated in the next step. (IMHO, there was no point in getting a perfect finish on both sides. My saw made very clean cuts – I didn’t even have to sand the surfaces).
Lay all the pieces on a horizontal surface and carefully add several drops of resin (can be clear) to the top surface, to get a slightly convex shape.
Push it around with a toothpick to cover the complete area. Don’t over-do the resin – you don’t want to waste time cleaning the edges of the pieces!

Good luck!

Richard

[Katherine Swift]

Thanks so much for sharing this Richard. I’m sure others will find this helpful too!

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