Chess Set

 

I have employed my 3d printers recently to put together a chess set for myself. I'm not a very good chess player, but I do enjoy a game from time to time.

The pieces are assembled from a variety of STLs I've found about the place. The king and queen are scans of archaic Greek statues, a kouros and kore, from the Smithsonian I think. The bishops and knights are files I found on Thingiverse. The rooks were originally also from a Thingiverse file, but I've edited it quite a bit. The pawns are Goblinoid Warriors from Fat Dragon Games. And everything has been put on to decorative bases that I whipped up in Blender. I've glued 32mm (1¼") steel washers underneath to lower the centre of gravity and make them less tippy; I'd like to add some thin felt as well, but we shall see.

The black pieces are in the process of being painted right now. They'll be dark red rather than pure black, so that a bit of the detail can be made out.

Later...

I have an extra pawn for each side, because they were printed in batches of three. So I'm taking those extras and gluing crowns on their heads, so that when a pawn is advanced to queendom, it can be replaced with one of these Uber-pawns.

I made the crown in Blender and printed them on my Mars Pro.

And later still...

Now the black pieces are all painted as well.

I'll give everything two or three spray coats of satin polyurethane to protect the paint from filthy grubby greasy fingers, and I think I might glue some felt to the bottoms of all of them as well.

And oh, bugger...

I made this little side-table some years ago.

I thought that I could just unscrew the top from the carcass, and have it as a free-floating chessboard, which would really have been more convenient for actual chess-playing purposes.

However, it appears that I glued it as well as screwing it together. I guess I thought that would be a good idea at the time. Turns out, that was not a good idea.

So, bugger. I suppose I'll just have to make another board now.

Some time later

2023-03-01

We found, in practise, that telling the kings and queens apart at a glance was not all that easy, in spite of their height disparity. So I crowned the queens so they can't be mistaken again.

Hopefully the crowns will be sturdy enough, but they're just resin which can be a bit breakable in the hands of the ham-fisted. The queens themselves are FDM printed in PLA+, so they should be able to take a fair battering.