For father's day a while back, I decided to build my dad a sweet chess board.
Little did I know how much time was going to be involved. I figured it would be as simple as cutting a bunch of different colored squares and gluing them together. Easy right? Wrong! Chessboards are 8x8 and by the time you get halfway through spreading glue on all four sides of 64 squares, the pieces you first glued together will surely have set. I saw this guy's video and decided to do what he did. Needless to say, it worked. I'll talk through how I did it.
We begin our journey of chess board creation by selecting three different kinds of wood, in my case they will be cherry (the light one), walnut (the dark one), and oak (for the borders). I'm sorry if I can't specify what kind of cherry, walnut, or oak. I have no idea what sub-category I used, nor do I think anyone reading this post will care.
Here are the pieces of cherry and walnut I used. I determined how much wood to use by cutting each one to the length of the checkerboard length-wise (probably longer) and about half of the length of the checkerboard width-wise (probably longer again).
I then jointed and planed the wood to make it square and easy to cut and proceeded to cut long strips as shown above. As our bald woodworking friend in the video above showed us, I glued those strips together like so:
After the glue set I scraped off excess glue and planed the board to get it flat again. I then cut the strips cross-grain, flipped every other newly cut strip, and glued them together again.
I am pretty sloppy when it comes to gluing and the board was not perfectly flat on top after being glued together. Right now you're probably saying to yourself "hey Tony! Why don't you just plane the top again to get it flat?" My response to that is that I can't! The grain is no longer going in the same direction. In math terms, you've got grain in some squares going along the x-axis and some squares with grain going along the y-axis. The planer requires all of the grain to be in the same direction. I'm sure you could send it through anyway, but it would tear out wood and ruin not only the planer but the chessboard as well! My solution? Use an orbital sander.
I'm sure you're also saying "WAIT A MINUTE... What is that piece of wood underneath the checkerboard for?!" Well, it's plywood and I glued it underneath the checkerboard for two reasons:
1) The pretty cherry/walnut checkerboard is not very thick after being jointed/planed, planed again, and then sanded. The actual checkerboard is ~1/4'' thick. Put simply, it needs reinforcement from plywood which is pretty hard to break.
2) The pretty cherry/walnut checkerboard is so thin that it's beginning to warp! Over time this will only get worse and we can't have that. Gluing it to the plywood will get it to sit flat and stay flat. Plywood doesn't warp nearly as easily as hardwood.
Sand again for good measure.
After squaring up the edges of the plywood with a router, I had it sitting right against the checkerboard. Nothing left to do but put the border on!
I used oak on the border simply because I already had it laying around and it's a nice looking wood. A radial-arm saw was used to cut the pieces at 45 degrees and they were glued on.
I used a router with an OG bit to put the fancy looking edges on the border, making sure to leave ~1/8'' at the bottom. Going too close to the bottom allows the border to break easily if accidently bumped against something.
After sanding there was nothing left to do except apply finish! I used danish oil.
This project took about two weeks since I had to let the board sit overnight every time I glued it.
-Tony
P.S. I still haven't found the charger for my camera, so all of these pictures were taken with my phone again. Sorry!
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