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matt (at) hairybrain (dot) co (dot) uk

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Making a Chess Set

Introduction

Some time ago I decided I wanted a nice chess set. I'm not very good at chess; that is to say, anyone who plays on average more than about once a month would probably kick my ass. Anyway, so what? I wanted a chess set with nice big chunky pieces, a funky, stylish (but traditional (i.e. Staunton-based)) design, nice materials and high-quality craftsmanship.

It turns out this is a rather ambitious set of requirements. My searches in shops and online revealed a plethora of sets with timid-looking kings, queens wearing doilies instead of crowns, rooks that would have had the wolf happily munching on a confused and indignant third little pig, and bishops with a kind of pederastic creepiness about them. This isn't right at all! Kings should be dignified and grandiose; queens, the most powerful pieces on the board, must look beautiful and deadly in equal measure, like the queen from Snow White (surely the hottest character in the film, at least before she turns herself into a fruit-peddling human scrotum); rooks should be solid, weighty and massive; and bishops (who in real life are never corrupt, filthy perverts) need to be graceful and statuesque.

So I bought a lathe and learned to use it. Nearly five years later, I've made loads of chess pieces in all shapes and sizes from many different types of wood, and all of a sudden I find myself on a mission to make the long-sought-after set. Here goes...

Materials

The raw blocks of wood - maple for the light pieces, cocobolo for the dark ones
Wood, obviously. For the light pieces, North American maple - not exactly exotic or expensive, but nevertheless pretty. It also has the advantage of being easy to work with. Oh, and I happen to have tons of the stuff lying around.

For the dark pieces, cocobolo. Cocobolo (like most tropical hardwoods) has exactly one good quality - it's very beautiful. The downsides are that it's expensive, dense, oily, hard, rare and poisonous. Moving even moderate-sized blocks of the stuff is difficult due to its weight. It's so hard and abrasive that it's not uncommon to have to sharpen tools several times during the manufacture of a single chess piece, and it's a real chore to use hand tools on. The oil content of the wood causes it to clog sandpaper and fine-toothed saw blades very quickly. Also, it's a health hazard, causing allergic reactions in most people. Since making this chess set will involve spending upwards of 60 hours bathing in cocobolo dust, this isn't ideal. Finally, the wood is very rare and endangered, so when I find a source of it, I buy as much as I possibly can, just in case it finally becomes extinct. Humourless readers will be frothing at the maw about now, so to all you people who have difficulty spotting sarcasm: I'm kidding. I buy from responsible suppliers.

Here is the wood for the pieces, cut to size. The blocks are all about 52mm square (with the obvious exception of the bits which aren't square). The pieces will have base diameters a smidge under two inches.

The Pawns

A half-finished pawn, with the reference design held next to it for easy comparison
I started with the pawns. This is a psychological ploy: the pawns are the quickest pieces to make. Blast through all 16 of them in one frenzied sawdusty binge, and then you can kid yourself that you're half finished. It's much easier laboriously turning stubborn blocks of wood into horses' heads if you can occasionally glance over at your magnificent phalanx of completed pawns, silently awaiting their comrades.

Pawns are both easy and difficult. They're easy because they're the only radially symmetric chess piece, and therefore the only one that can be completed fully on the lathe, without the need for sawing, carving, riffling, filing, notching or chiselling. They're also the smallest piece. However, more than any other type of piece, pawns have to match each other. True, there are other pieces on the board which have to match, but only pawns appear eight in a row, conveniently arranged for unappreciative, pedantic whingers to blurt out things like "that one's taller than that one!" If, say, the white rooks aren't quite the same as each other, who really cares? Who's going to notice? But the pawns must be as monotonously unvarying and facelessly conformist as the working-class cannon fodder they represent.

So, I rigged up a gadget to hold a pawn in place while I turned its brothers (is that sexist? Maybe I should say "siblings"). It's just a load of copper wire, twisted up for rigidity, attached to a bit of wood which is held onto the headstock by a small but fiercely powerful rare earth magnet. Pretty low-tech, but it does the job. With this setup, I got all 16 pawns done in two days.

The finished pawns, with the remaining blanks
A quick word about how I finish the pieces. They're sanded while spinning on the lathe (about 1500 rpm to 2500 rpm for maple; slower for cocobolo, or the heat generated melts the wood's natural oils and clogs the sandpaper) with abrasive papers in 120, 150, 180, 240, 320, 400, 600, 1000 and 1500 grit (obviously in that order). With the maple I reverse the lathe for alternate sandings, so that the grain doesn't just "lie down" but is smoothed properly. For the cocobolo, this isn't necessary because the wood is so dense and fine-grained. After sanding, the piece is burnished with a handful of wood shavings. Then it's given a coat of shellac diluted with ethanol (to penetrate the grain), followed by a couple of coats of undiluted shellac lubricated with a drop or two of olive oil. This isn't exactly French polishing, but it's a close approximation. Spinning the lathe nice and fast for the final coat brings the piece to a lustrous shine and renders the finish touch-dry, which is a big time saver.

I part the pieces off with a hacksaw and not a parting tool, and yes, I do it with the lathe spinning at about 400 rpm. Responses to this range from "so what?" to "you shouldn't be allowed near a lathe!" All I'll say in response is that I've never hurt myself doing things this way, it wastes a minimal amount of wood and it's convenient. So there.

The Knights

After bandsawing to shape
After carving
After a rough sanding
The finished knight
Knights. What a pain. I reckon that when Nathaniel Cook was designing the pattern of chess pieces which was to become the modern gold standard, he simply lost interest half way through - which is why the pawn, rook, bishop, king and queen are all distinctive, beautiful abstractions, and the knights are bluntly literal horses' heads. Come to think of it, why are they horses' heads? Yes, knights ride horses - but so what? Kings and queens ride horses too. Well, whatever. It could have been worse - imagine if Cook had run out of good designs before doing the kings and queens. I wouldn't fancy having to make wood carvings of inbred, chinless morons. On a practical note, many members of the royal family actually resemble horses, which could lead to confusion with the knights.

Mother nature didn't see fit to equip the common horse with a geometrically simple form, describable as an elegant union of spheres, cylinders, tori and prisms - instead she produced a nonsensical mess of hair, teeth, nostrils, eyes and myriad other bizarre shapes which defy the ordered precision of lathes and milling machines. You can turn the base of a knight on a lathe as usual, and thereafter the rest of the blank must be hewn into the required shape using a combination of sawing, carving, filing, sanding and swearing.

My knights have a tendency to turn out looking like mooses (meese?), which isn't so bad because I think mooses are cute. Actually they're more like a cross between a moose and a hippopotamus. Well, as long as they have some individuality, the usability of the set isn't compromised.

The sequence of pictures shows how a knight is made. First the base is turned; then the horsey bit is roughly sawn into shape on the bandsaw. This involves some finicky cuts near the blade and because the piece is a strange, irregular shape there's virtually no support from the table, so it's easy to lose fingers here. There are four knights so it's vital not to average more than 2.5 amputated digits per piece.

Next, the head is roughly cut into shape. Ordinarily this would be done using a carefully maintained, razor sharp honed set of expensive carving tools. I don't have any such thing because I don't really do wood carving, so I use a crappy old chisel which I occasionally scrape impatiently against a grindstone.

After this, a sanding with coarse abrasive cloth licks the knight further into shape. A side note: the knight is being held in my old lathe (a Record DML24X), which is serving as not much more than a sturdy vice.

Finally, the details are carved in and polish applied. Awesome hairstyle, huh?

The Rooks

Rook cutting setup: milling machine, rotary table with chuck, custom arbor with biscuit jointer blade attached
I'm really rather pleased with these. Rooks are deceptively difficult to get right. The basic shape is similar to that of a pawn, the differences being that a rook is bigger, has more decorative bits and has a cylindrical head with battlements cut into it. Turning these on the lathe is easy and hollowing the top of the head is quickly done with a forstner bit held in a chuck in the tailstock. The trick, then, is to cut the battlements properly. Cutting the crown of a queen is dead easy by comparison because the required shape is rounded and organic. Cutting a crisp, accurate notch with a rectangular cross section is much harder. Trying this "by eye" using a hacksaw and files and sandpaper and chisels is an exercise in frustration. Using a bandsaw makes the job a little more tolerable, but still far from easy. There's a much better way.

So, what we have here is a chuck mounted on a rotary table mounted vertically on a milling machine. Yes, I know, the rotary table is far too big for the mill. If this bothers you, feel free to buy me a bigger milling machine. In the spindle of the milling machine is a stub arbor, i.e. a hardened ground Morse taper shank with a soft steel head, on which I've turned a shallow 22mm spigot using my trusty engineering lathe. The head was then drilled and tapped M6. Then all one has to do is stick a biscuit jointer blade on the spigot and secure it with a washer and M6 machine screw, and presto - a custom wide-kerf slotting saw! The mill only spins this blade at about 15% of the speed it was designed for, but this doesn't seem to matter at all. It cuts beautifully.

Closeup of one of the cuts
The rest is self-explanatory. Advance the table so that the saw cuts a slot to the required depth; move back out of the cut; advance the rotary table by 60 degrees; repeat.

Queens, kings and bishops

We've handled pawns, knights and rooks; that leaves kings, queens and bishops. There's nothing very difficult about these pieces, although they each have their quirks. Briefly, then:

1. Getting a queen to look good involves a surprisingly fine balance of the proportons of the piece. It's astonishingly easy to wreck a queen by making it too fat, too thin, too big-bottomed, too big-headed, too spiky, too wide or too much like it's wearing a bowler hat, which, believe it or not, is very possible indeed.

2. Kings have a "cross pattée" at the top, which means the arms of the cross are rather big and supported by narrow bits with the grain running in exactly the wrong direction. Tread very very lightly when cutting these unless you just love gluing things back together.

3. The slot in the top of a bishop is as annoying to cut as the slots in rooks. I did these by hand but next time, I think I'm going to stick the bishops in the rook-slot-cutting jig.

And that's all the pieces dealt with. That just leaves...

The Board

Some veneer squares and the blocks they're cut from, on the MDF base
Gluing the ebony edges on. Note the froth that the polyurethane adhesive has produced in the joint
The board's easy, right? Well, no. Getting 64 squares of wood cut accurately and arranged properly is a process which carries an enormous potential for error.

The smart way to do it is to cut long strips of wood in each colour and glue them together, to make a board with 8 stripes rather than 64 squares. Then you cut this into eight pieces perpendicular to the stripes and flip alternate pieces around and glue them back together. This is all very well if you have an accurate table saw and wood of the right dimensions, although it does mean that the bits of wood have to be thick enough to make edge-bonding them into a panel feasible. When you're making a 2 foot square board using cocobolo, this is bloody expensive.

Anyway, I don't have a table saw and I don't crap diamonds, so I was forced to do it the hard way and make 64 veneer squares and glue them into place one by one. The base of my board is a bit of 18mm thick MDF. I cut 75mmx75mmx3mm bits of cocobolo and maple (32 of each, obviously) on the bandsaw and got out my bottle of PVA. 100 points for anyone who can tell what's about to go wrong.

See, PVA glue has water in it. Smearing PVA on one side of a bit of 3mm thick maple causes it to slurp this water up, and it stops being a lovely flat square and starts looking like a pringle. This happens long before the glue has formed a bond between the square and the base board, so the square has to be held flat and in place. I confidently laid down 16 squares using the PVA and then gawped in horror as the wood went all bendy and lifted off the base board. Luckily, I had a towel, an offcut of MDF, some lead bricks and about 50kg of soapstone to hand, all of which I piled on top of the curly squares (in that order), hoping it would hold them flat until the glue had set. 24 hours later, I was very relieved to find my plan had worked.

But this wouldn't do for the rest of the board, so I switched to polyurethane glue. This stuff doesn't have water in it so it doesn't make wood change shape. It does, however, try to expand into a foam as it sets, which is tiresome - you stick a square down, wait 5 minutes, then come back and find that it's hovering 4mm above the board on a little foamy pillow. So you lean on it to push it back into place, and wait another 5 minutes. This process continues until the glue has largely set, which thankfully is after about only half an hour. Next time I do this I'll try either epoxy resin or slow-acting cyanoacrylate (i.e. superglue), both of which will cost much more than PVA or polyurethane but ought to be much more convenient and faster.

Finally I used a router and a straight edge to true up the edges of the board, stuck ebony strips to the sides and hacked everything into shape with a spokeshave and random orbit sander until it was looking delicious. The board is finished in the "obvious" manner: wipe on shellac, allow to dry, rub with steel wool and 1500 grit abrasive, polish with beeswax/turpentine paste. Finishing is, of course, its own enormous topic, but this page is already far too long.

Finished!

The finished set
The dark pieces. Great grain in the cocobolo, huh?
And there we have it. All in all I'm pleased with how it turned out. Things I'll do differently next time:

1. Cut the tops of the bishops using my magical milling machine jig thingy.

2. Give the knights even more fearsome 80's hairstyles.

3. Use ebony instead of cocobolo. It's just as exotic and (in my opinion) just as beautiful, but it's better behaved.

4. Use a sensible glue to make the board.

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