Having been thoroughly beaten by Morgan’s friends and relatives at the Kelley ranch on several occasions, I decided it was time to build my own set of cornhole boards.
The builders had left me with a good supply of 2×4 wood, so all I needed to buy were the expensive parts: plywood, bolts and nuts. The official cornhole board dimensions are quite exacting as shown in the diagram. They should also weigh a minimum of 25 pounds each. Very few commercial boards weigh this much, but my combination of 14 feet of 2×4 and the plywood in each board certainly satisfied that requirement. My boards can also be used as weight training equipment.
The hole is a 6 inch circle, so rather than mess with a jig saw I ordered a 6 inch hole saw. There was the first problem: the shaft of that saw was to big to fit in my wimpy drill chuck. In true DYI fashion, I used the cornhole set as an excuse to augment my power tool collection with a fancy DeWalt drill. Problem solved. Instructions for making cornhole boards are readily available on line, the only tricky bit is getting the legs the correct height, angle and pivot. Five coats of varnish and three coats of paint later they were finished. Gray is not the most exciting color, but it matches my shed (that is not actually a American Cornhole Association requirement).
Of course I also needed a matching scoreboard which I designed using the best features of versions I found on line. Alison offered to make the bags (four each of two different colors), but it worked out that buying finished bags was cheaper than the materials to make them.
Armed with a new cornhole set, I’m ready to perfect my game and take on all comers. So far my game does not seem to have improved much, but as they say “practice makes perfect”. Maybe the grass is too long.