I'd be interested in a running dialog on this project of yours. I made a few chessboards a while back and am toying with trying to make a set of men..You could either scare me or encourage me...not sure which way it'll fall right now .
I don't know which set you got, but I agree. Mine are the "Marshall" version, which is what I needed to get to size for that board I made.
I got a lathe for Christmas, and one of my plans for the thing was a set of chessmen based on these plastic ones. I don't have any suitably thick stock in any appropriate wood though. I never thought about that until I started turning. 4/4 lumber does not a good turning blank make when the base of the thing is 1 1/4" in diameter.
Anyway, I'll come up with something eventually.
Your post reminded me of one that I had been meaning to make, so I'll tack it on. What do you, wood wrecker and chess grand master extraordinaire, think about contrasting pieces with the board?
I'm going to make myself a walnut/maple chess box when the weather gets warmer. I've been debating whether to make the pieces out of walnut/maple, or choose something else, like cherry/ash or whatever I can come up with in turnable stock.
One argument says making pieces out of the same boards as the chess board would be very cool indeed (but I'd have to do a glue-up to make the blanks in that case, or else mail order some 8/4 or whatever lumber), and another one says that pieces *exactly* the same color/texture as the board might tend to be easy to overlook. Not exactly invisible, but maybe I forget about the walnut rook on the walnut square until it checkmates me. In the latter case, going for strong contrast might be a good thing, and I could pick any pair of light/dark woods that I could get in log form for my stock.
What do you think?
BTW, I have no freaking idea how I'm going to do the knights. None whatsoever. I couldn't carve my way out of a wet paper bag with a CNC carving machine.
Truth is, given what a bitch it will be to make all these pieces look right, I'm thinking about just using the damn plastic ones. They may be plastic, but they sure look good. Much nicer than any chess sets I've ever had before, and I've had wood in the past.
On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 03:41:45 -0500, Silvan brought forth from the murky depths:
So learn.
Heck, it wouldn't take much of your spare time, not more than two or three hundred hours. Maybe less if you used a Foredom Dremel, or HFT rotary tool for the fine details.
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A chess set was my very first turning project, so I had no experience or skill starting out, but I did keep track of how long it took to do the job.
The pawns averaged about 20 minutes each; a bishop or rook needed 30 minutes. The kings took about an hour; the queens slightly less. The walnut knights took two hours apiece; the maple ones took around two and a half to three hours.
These times included sawing the lathe blank from the lumber, turning, sanding, and applying one coat of oil, but not boring the base, pouring the lead ballast, felting the bottom, or applying the second (final) coat of finish. Oh, the times do include that lost on the half-dozen or so that I ruined with dig-ins and various other goofs.
I did not carve much detail, really, but that was a design choice. I suppose it would have taken perhaps another twenty or thirty minutes on each of the knights, and something less on the queens and rooks to bring the level of detail reasonably close to what is common for wood Staunton sets. I think it would be quite difficult to get it to what is common for the plastic sets; the material just isn't as suitable for such fine detail.
So, something in the range of 25 to 30 hours to get the basic pieces out, plus another five or six hours for weight, felt and final finish.
I bought a set that is the size I want to make. That scaling stuff is too sophisticated for me.
I was going to cobble up a simple copying device for the lathe that should let me copy pretty fine detail. My old duplicator is OK for bigger stuff but not for these little things.
Thomas J. Watson-Cabinetmaker (ret) Real Email is: tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet Website:
I think that the color is only part of the design thinking. I like pieces with some heft to them. Now, the bottoms could be hollowed and filled with glued in metal (I think that molten lead would char the wood), so maybe that makes the heft thing go away.
I've got some ebony around here somewheres and I was thinking of using some satinwood for the white pieces but might try to scratch up some holly (or use some apple that I've got but I don't know how well that turns and holds detail. See, there's another thing - the wood needs to be able to hold some pretty fine detail without a lot of the small stuff breaking off later.
Here's the set that I'm using for a model:
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last chessboard that I made was knocked up from cherry and maple ply, with a walnut border:
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like the look of the black and white men on the wood board.
Mike Hide would be the man to talk to about carving the Knights. His carving work is extraordinary, whereas mine is extra-ordinary.
The best tip I was ever given for replicating carving was to break down the piece into elements that you can understand, rather than trying to think of the whole thing at once - that's too scary. But the really good carvers that I've seen go after a piece differently than that. I'm going to work from the general outline to the details and work the details one at a time, from the largest to the smallest.
As you said, these particular plastic men look better than any pieces that I've ever owned, so, if I screw up - we'll always have Plastic.
Thomas J. Watson-Cabinetmaker (ret) Real Email is: tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet Website:
If you keep the thickness of the wood to 1/8" minimum and keep the pour relatively cool, you shouldn't have a charring problem. That's how I did mine.
Ebony is problematic for chess pieces. It turns beautifully, and takes fine detail very well, but if the set will be used with any frequency, you will break pieces. The collars of the pawns will go first. The knights' noses and parts of the mouth (if it's open) will be right behind. Basically any small cross-section of face grain will be weak. I love the look of ebony, but it's just too brittle for a "player" set. For an occasional set or decorative one, it's fine, though.
I wonder if there is any kind of treatment that would render the pieces more resistant to this kind of damage without substantially altering the look.
I remember back when lots of folks were using PEG (PolyEthyleneGlycol)(sp?) to stabilize wood - not for this purpose but the basic idea of an immersion in something that would alter the characteristics of the wood is what I'm going at.
I'm not much for having stuff around the house that can't be used in the hurly burly of everyday life, so this set will be a user rather than a showpiece.
Thomas J. Watson-Cabinetmaker (ret) Real Email is: tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet Website:
I'm not really all that interested in carving. I've tried my hand a time or two, dating all the way back to the days when I used to make myself replacement laser guns for my Star Wars action figures out of balsa. Carving has never really tickled my fancy. For that kind of thing, I'd much sooner work in clay, where I can put material back if I've removed too much.
I do have a Dremel with a flex shaft attachment, but knights look like complicated little critters. This is something I'd really rather trade for beer, really. I'm hoping to hook up with a carver at some point.
I'll work up to the turning soon though. My biggest problem at this point is with getting the pieces to look *just* like the prototype. I can get the features in there, but I haven't had great success getting an accurate reproduction of a turned salt shaker yet. I figure nail the salt shaker a few times, and then try something much, much smaller.
(Or scale them up and make some honking bigass chessmen... :)
Molten lead *will* char the wood, but probably not enough to matter. That's what I do to weight my son's Jummywood Derby cars. It works fine. I made a little crucible out of some scrap copper, with a pointy pouring spout on one end. It's a bit of work to juggle everything so you don't pour molten lead on yourself. That smarts. DAMHIKT.
It flows at a relatively low temperature though, and if you get the amount of drop just right, it will still be liquid, but will have cooled almost to the point of being solid again by the time it hits the wood. The trick is to pour a little, let it cool, pour a little more... If you fill it to the top in one shot, the lump of lead will stay hot longer, and have more time to char the wood fibers.
True. Something with closed pores and tight grain would be in order, I suppose. Maple would probably work. Walnut might be iffy. I guess a cheating man could make the whole set out of maple, and then "ebonize" the black pieces. Lots of those $BIGNUM House of Staunton sets at the cheaper end of the extremely expensive spectrum are ebonized in that fashion. I seem to recall that you don't get better until you're in for a grand or so.
Yours are a little bigger and a little nicer than mine, but they're both really quite extraordinarly excellent, I must say. Damn good looking for plastic.
Thanks for turning me onto them back when. I've since purchased three sets.
taking any. The board didn't come out quite right, but it's close enough to play on. I'm going to do it all again, and get it right this time, applying lessons learned. Probably once more in walnut/soft maple with a walnut frame.
I'm thinking about playing with my scroll saw too. I haven't tried this on a large scale yet, but I've done some neat stuff by clamping two pieces together and cutting curvy stuff through the middle, then swapping pieces and gluing back together. I'm planning to do that for my box. I guess it will pretty much demand mitered corners to look right, so I have to think about doing splines or something to reinforce them. Good project when spring finally gets around to showing up.
I do too, but wood doesn't come in black and white unless you paint it. :) Even ebony (all the ebony I've seen anyway) isn't really quite black. White is easier. Lots of woods are pretty close to white. I guess holly is *really* close to white, but I think my grandpa would get pissed off at me if I went down and cut down his holly trees. ;)
Ever work with holly? I never have. It might be worth going down there and lopping off a few fat branches toward the back. He'd never notice. ;)
Mine just flat sucks. I get what you're saying about breaking it down into smaller objectives, but my problem is when something chips off and I have to start the damn thing all over again. That's why I like working in clay better.
Yeah, if only these were wood, I wouldn't even think about trying to make my own. I'll bet their more exotic wood sets look this good too. Some of the detail is astonishing. Then again, so are the prices.
Hard to say. Walnut and "rosewood" are popular. I put rosewood in quotes because I don't know what kind of wood those "rosewood" sets are really made of, but it's much lighter than the rosewood I've worked with (dalbergia stevonsonii). *That*, by the way, would be an excellent choice. I absolutely love that stuff, but I suppose any dark wood with good split resistance would be ok for Black.
I used walnut because I like it, and I had some dark 8/4 material handy. You might worry that walnut is too soft, but it has held up well for right at ten years now of fairly heavy use. I play weekly for several hours at a time.
For White, maple and boxwood are the species I've seen most frequently, but there are plenty more good choices for the light color. Boxwood is a little lighter in color and weight and takes detail very well. Maple is bit difficult to carve, owing to its hardness.
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