After three Scrabble tournaments, I got the desire to build my own Scrabble board. These were the main materials that I needed:

• 20" round, wooden board
• tile board (plus premium tile sheet)
• lazy susan
• miscellaneous things like paint, clamps, an exacto blade, etc.
• patience

Lowe's had some ready-made round boards but they were too think and too wide. The solution? I had to make my own. I bought a 25"x25" board, about 3/4" thick, and using a crafty idea on my dad's part, drew a circle on what I decided to be the bottom of the board. Here's the square board with the tools and the circle:

After cutting the circle using an electric saw (safety first—ear muffs, glasses or safety goggles, and watch those hands!) (going slowly to be accurate, approximately 10 minutes' time), I sanded the edges and made a kind of bevel effect on the top and bottom rims. Here's the board next to the lazy susan that will be mounted underneath:

That's some sexy wood, eh? The next step was to stain the wood. Here's the top of the board after one coat:

Once that dried, I applied a protective spray. The board's the same color but the pictures were taken at different times of the day.

I wanted the wood to show through the plastic where the non-premium tile squares were, so my next project was to take the tile sheet and cut out the plain tiles with an exacto knife.

It was a tedious process but it got done. I also cut off the edges so that the paper would ride flush with the plastic game piece.

Below is the plastic game piece in question, by itself, and next to the board and tile sheet. I bought it on eBay as part of an old-school deluxe set, then just sawed off the edges to keep the 15x15 part.

I opted not to use the plastic lazy susan after I found a seller on eBay with an abundant supply of these metallic, much sturdier susans. However, I wasn't ready to pay shipping for the product if I could find it in town. Office Depot didn't have it but Home Depot did!

Next, I glued the tile sheet onto the plastic board. I needed a glue that dried clear but all those that I had didn't, so I had to improvise. Caulk is stronger than glue and it dries clear.

Almost there! I piled up a few (11) Encyclopaedia Britannicas to hold the plastic board in place after caulking it to the wood. The finished product (after a night of EB pressure) is on the right. You can see that the caulk takes a while to dry clear.

Finally, here's a game that I played with myself with the caulk almost entirely dried.

It took a while to finish but it was well worth it, and it was definitely the envy of the Scrabble club the following week. ;)