Making A Chess Board - End-Grain Style

a friend of mine asked me to build him a chess board to give to his dad for his birthday and there was not a whole lot of time to do it so I didn't film it the first time around but I ended up with enough left over in this first glue up that I decided to make a second one and that's why we're starting here kind of in the middle and what was an N green style board going using a black walnut and ash here in the glue up I used some straight edges on the sides to try to keep the corners of all of the individual pieces lined up perfectly well the glue is drying on the actual game board I switch over to milling up some black walnut for a frame to go around the board so I do the standard process of running it over the jointer and then going through a planer and just squaring everything up so that it's all uniform then I take it over the table saw and trim the board to the final width that they're going to end up being I think in this case I went with three inches for the entire frame then I square off the ends of the board and then cut all the boards to link let me use a biscuit joiner to help strengthen the corners and join everything together the thickness of the frame got a little thinner than I wanted it to so those biscuits come pretty close to the surface on one side but it's not a big deal that worked out just fine it didn't have any long clamps laying around so I had to assemble this all in one piece and then lay it down to get it to fit in my clamps now that the glue is dry get the board out of the clamps and run it through the drum sander to clean off all the glue and start standing up all of the saw marks I can do the same thing with the frame as well [Music] Here I am cutting a recess into the frame that the board is going to sit down into this is a bit that has a small bearing in it at the moment to make it a half-inch rabbeting bit you can swap out the bearings on this to make different size rabbits which is pretty handy going to take the actual game board to the same rabbeting bit and and cut a channel all the way around essentially creating a positive and a negative on the board and the frame so that they fit into each other the only bit of cleanup was the round bit leaves a round corner so I have to square off the corners and make room for the the squared game board I could have gone the other way and rounded off the corners of the game board I suppose but this seemed easier and there they fit together just perfectly then lots and lots of sanding i think i standed up to 320 on this one because I wanted to have just an absolutely smooth finish then I had some heat to my brand and I've got my brand stuck in a drill press so that it makes a perfect press here's just a piece of scrap wood that I'm using to test and make sure that the brand was heated evenly and it makes a good mark and now I can take and press it into the underside of the actual game board and into the bottom of the frames one of the benefits of doing it in a drill press is that if you didn't do it long enough on the first press you can actually press it a second time and it comes back down exactly the same spot so you don't get sort of a double image problem now I'm applying some tung oil as a surface finish to this it brings out the color of these woods really well and then I let it dry for an entire day and then I came back with high-gloss lacquer since this is going to be a used game surface I wanted it to be pretty strong I really enjoy working with lacquer because it tends to be fairly forgiving in my experience if you leave some brush marks if you if you didn't get it quite perfect it tends to almost self level it seems like and fill in some of the minut hills and valleys it also takes additional coats really well after I dried overnight I came back with some 220 sandpaper to sand the surface before I went on with the second coat taking a clean cloth to make sure I remove all of the dust that came from sanding then it's just rinse and repeat I applied a second coat let it dry overnight and then sanded it again I think I ended up with a total of three coats because of a potential for wood movement I decided to go with a sort of elastic sort of forgiving glue in the corners of the two pieces of the frame and the board that way it's not stuck rigidly it has the ability to flex a little bit and be forgiving during wood expansion then I just added some little self-adhesive felt feet to the bottom to keep it from scratching up a table or whatever else sitting on and that's pretty much it it's ready to play I had some glass chess pieces in a drawer somewhere from an old board that is long since gone and so I just wanted to set it up and see what it looked like I didn't think I was going to like the glass on my wood board but I think it does some really interesting contrasting and I'm not sure I'm going to do anything different I think I'm just going to keep it with these pieces anyway that's my whole chess board let me know what you think thanks guys ah

Channel: Gunflint Designs

Views: 162,587

Keywords: woodworking, wood working, wood worker, wood shop, end grain, chess, chess board, chess piece, hand made, handmade, black walnut, ash, lumber, ruff sawn, board game, power tools, lacquer, branding iron, tung oil, high gloss, maker, builder, diy, do it yourself, table saw, jointer, planer, drill press, biscuit jointer, drum sander, voice over

Id: gWeZ2M8su00

Length: 6min 59sec (419 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2017