How to (NOT) make a Chessboard | Beginner's Mistakes

hey guys thanks for checking out my video today I'm going to show you the process I went through to make my first chess board there are lots of mistakes in it and so I hope to be able to share those with you in an effort to help you avoid them if you would like to do something like this yourself so the woods I'm using our hard maple that's the wider stuff and then the red stuff is called the Duke it's an african hardwood and it's actually my first time working with exotic hardwood and it was pretty cool so the first step in making a chess board is figuring out the size of squares that you want I decided on 2 inch squares for my board then you need to cut your stock to length make sure to leave yourself about an extra inch in case you mess up I cut my board 17 inches long which ended up being just enough I should have cut them a bit longer to be safe but it worked out in the end once of the right length you need to cut them to width this should be the exact width of your desired squares now I wasn't thinking the first time I did this and I thought it would be cool to have slightly bigger squares so I ended up cutting them at 2 and 1/8 which doesn't sound like much more but that would require an extra inch in length because the final board is 8 by 8 squares so here I am doing the glue up of the two and 1/8 inch boards which I'm just going to have to recut because they aren't long enough for that size of squares luckily I realized this before was too late otherwise I would have wasted all that material one really valuable lesson I learned was about gluing I thought you needed to crank down on the boards as hard as you could to get a good bond but that ended up creating a bow which caused other kinds of problems so as far as I understand it definitely needs to be snug but don't crank on it with all your strength and Here I am cutting those strips apart again the blade takes out about an eighth of an inch so after doing this I had those 2 inch wide strips I had originally planned for I had to square up this edge of the board to run it against the fence of the table saw because it wasn't perfectly flat after the glue up I used the tracks off for this and just checking that it's perfectly square once that edge was square I'd shoot up the other end of the board which wasn't really necessary because it just sended up as scrappy another issue I really should have corrected before any of this was that my paducah was actually a bit thicker than the maple this made cutting these strips on the table saw difficulty because it kept getting caught as I was pushing it through ideally just run all the boards through a planer or a drum sander before gluing them up [Applause] here we see how to achieve the checker pattern just rotate every other strip and voila alright so here's the glue up of those strips they had to be perfectly aligned otherwise it would ruin the pattern so I just took my time and made sure that I had just at the board's as needed as I was tightening the clamps the squares ended up perfectly aligned but because of my terrible clamping strategy it definitely made the board more wonky than it should have been also I think that a better gluing table would help a lot just resting the clamps on the table isn't the best and I think that also contributed to the problem if anyone has any actual tips for gluing boards like this please write them in the comments below that would help me out a lot my poor glueing skills created a lot more work for me if I had a planer big enough to put this through it wouldn't be so bad but all I had was this little drum sander so I sent it away with that for a couple of hours no fun [Applause] [Applause] but in the end I think it turned out pretty okay now that the board is all the same thickness I sanded it with an orbital sander to take out any marks left over from the drum sander I did take it all the way to 220 grit here but I should have saved the final sanding for well closer to the end of the project as I just ended up doing it again I also had to clean up two edges of the board because they weren't perfectly flat I decided to do it by hand because I didn't want to take off too much material and end up with weird rectangles on either side of the board you could probably use a belt sander if you're really careful next it was time to create the border which I wanted to do in two parts I had the strip of maple leftover from cutting the original strips so I went about cutting some thin strips out of it now when cutting thin strips on a table saw they tend to get caught between the fence and the blade they're usually not dangerous just stand of the way and be careful it can be surprising if they fly back at you like that though then I just cleaned up those strips on the drum sander this was quick and easy and then it was time to glue them up I did this in two parts just gluing up two opposing sides at a time I wanted to make sure everything got glued flat so I hammered it down it's kind of funny to see in this footage that the chess board actually raises up and I hit it on this hand and then lowers back down when I hit it on the other in the end I worked out fine since I had so much extra space here I'm just cutting off the extra material before I put it through the drum sander to take down the thickness you can see in this shot just how much material I had to remove from the board to get a flat and honestly the bottom still has issues but I gave up on her since it was you know the bottom and a final cleanup of the corners and now it's time for part two of the border this ended up being the hardest part of the entire project for me it took a lot of figuring out and I had to do things I've never done before which actually is basically everything since in about this but so I cut what I have left of the paduka length and width but I didn't want a flat border I wanted an angle so I had to adjust the table saw to cut the two strips as close as I could get to right in half diagonally I [Music] thought I had it exactly right here but I was still a bit off I just had to go back and fix her later this was probably the scariest cut I've done [Music] you can see here the pieces on the right are just a bit taller I just had to cut off the bottoms to make it the right height it was slightly difficult because I didn't have a flat edge against the fence you can see my push that keeps slipping and pushing the piece into the blade a bit in the end it wasn't too big of a problem and I got a right now I wanted to make it look like the main chessboard sat above the padieu porter so I had to make them a bit thinner so I got my measurement and cut the top down this gave me I thought a nicely shaped border they did have some marks those so I just had to clean those up on the belt sander here I'm marking the 45-degree angles for the joints I just marked the one end on each board so I could go back and mark the other end once I had them fitting well I've never done 45-degree joints before as I'm sure you'll see here shortly we moved the miter saw to the front porch because we're remodeling and was easier to test our new floor out there but this is where I made my first mistake if you look closely I flipped two of the pieces around and cut off the other end because I thought that's what I had to do to make them fit the other pieces I was wrong I really needed to swing the miter saw around to the other 45 for the other corners I figured it out eventually and here's all the pieces cut correctly this time and fitting somewhat okayish there's some pretty bad gaps but I didn't think I could get them any better by sanding or cutting them farther and I had a plan on how to fill them so I decided to glue it up it was helpful to match each edge with the border that I thought would fit best so I put numbers on them this assembly table was quite nice for clamping as it provided something to clamp against the clamps on the table held the border down and I put the long clamps on the table and the board itself it worked out well so I just repeated the process a few more times and here are those ugly ugly gaps unfortunately one of the border pieces ended up higher than the others it wasn't something I couldn't fix but it was annoying I kept all these scrap pieces from previous cuts and they ended up working pretty well I'll fill those gaps I just glued them in with superglue I also kept some dust for finer spaces it certainly wasn't a perfect solution but it's the best I had if anyone has good tips on how to do 45 so they actually fit each other that would be awesome and of course it took a lot of sanding to clean up I sanded so much I kind of took off the hard corners but I like the rounded look as well it looks more like is done on a shaper I think and here's the nearly end result after a lot of sanding and of course the final step before applying the finish was more sanding you to finish I chose was this wipe-on poly it's really easy to apply and leaves a nice satin finish I wanted to avoid it looking like plastic and after a couple of coats of that sanding in between it was done let me know what you guys think I really enjoyed making this project hopefully you learned something I know I did and please like and subscribe thanks [Music] you [Music]

Channel: BA Woodworking

Views: 86,887

Rating: 4.7989073 out of 5

Keywords: how to, maple, padauk, chessboard, woodworking, bawoodworking

Id: 7xKOAVS69qA

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2018