Plywood chess set by ohammersmith

Description

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.

Instructions

Laser cut the pieces, twice. Stain or somehow color the dark pieces. Fit them together and glue.

Take note of the "intentional" key-ing of the bases, the 3-tab will only fit one way. The center tab is half a millimeter bigger than all the other tabs.

For the board, cut it out and then run the black squares over it at a 100% speed, 100% power to get a nice golden color. I've added pictures of the board now that the second copy is done.

They're up on etsy now, if you'd rather buy than build.