I made this chess set for my Grandfather's 90th birthday. I laser it cut it out of 3mm birch plywood and stained the dark pieces. The board is alternating etched & bare squares.

Now that I'm back from the trip, I'm getting around to posting the designs up.

I hope to make another set, maybe with etched or a scored pattern for the dark pieces, rather than having to stain them and wait for all that boring drying.

I designed it in SketchUp. First I snagged some standard looking models for chess pieces from the warehouse. Then I scaled the king to a height of 85mm and scaled the rest to match (pretty closely) the same base size as the king. I drew two 90-degree planes through each one and made them components. Then I intersected one face of the plane with the rest of the model and got the lines I wanted. I pulled out that new face to 1/2 the width of the ply and did the same to the other side. Intersecting the two parts got me the lines for the notches.

A good bit of twiddling later, I used the SVG from SketchUp faces plugin to export one face of each of the parts. I've noticed the newer version gives much smoother paths, I think there are some gaps in the current version of the files I'm uploading.

Note: I've updated the svg files using the newer version of the SVG plugin, which does a single path. It cuts much cleaner. I have not, however, updated the EPS with all the pieces laid out on a single board. I'm leaving it here, just in case someone wants it.

I created a color profile for the Epilog 45W at TechShop Durham.