Chess, Checkers, and Backgammon

I made a self storing chess and checkers board with a backgammon board on the inside. There is a box for the chess pieces and a box for the checkers and backgammon pieces. The outer box was made from 1/4" PG cherry plywood with 1/8" maple plywood overlay with 1/8" walnut plywood inserts. The inner boxes were made from 1/8" maple plywood. The chess and checker pieces, including the dice and doubling cube for backgammon were printed on a Creality Ender 3 v2 using PLA filament. I found the hinges and latch online.








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Very well done!

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Well done, the cherry, maple, walnut really work well together. You did a nice job on the overlay, a clever alternative to inlaying the darker pieces, but is there an 1/8" lip between the squares?

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I love it! I wanted to do something similar, but I was stumped on how to make the hinges. Yours is so nice looking. I like how you hid the look of the joints on the playing surface.

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The maple overlay has cutouts for the walnut inlay, so the surface is flat (at least within the tolerance of the PG material thicknesses).

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Excellent endurance to see that through. All in, how many hours do you think assembly took?

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Unfortunately, the hinges I bought were countersunk on the wrong side for my purposes and would not open completely flat. I had to drill new countersinks on what was originally the “wrong” side as manufactured so the box could be open all of the way.

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Once I had the design down, it takes about 8 hours to cut out all of the pieces and another 8 hours or so to assemble things. Of course, there is some overlap as I can be assembling some pieces while others are being cut, but if I work more than about 4 hours straight, I start to make mistakes. That says more about me, though, than it does the difficulty of the task.

Getting the walnut to fit within the cutouts of the maple was most tedious and took a lot of trial and error with scraps to get the correct dimensions for the walnut. It seems that kerf is different in the X direction than it is in the Y direction The maple cutouts nominally were square, but to get the walnut to fit correctly, the inlays are rectangles (but just barely - 51.750 mm x 51.200 mm is what I had to tell Inkscape to get an actual piece that is 51.18 x 51.15). A light tap from the mallet seated the walnut into the maple.

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That turned out great! And the boxes for the pieces are wonderful too. Fantastic job!

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Oh, that’s lovely. Your attention to detail is outstanding!

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Great idea, but isn’t the backgammon board somewhat t4uncated?

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This is excellent!

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Wonderful project! That will make for hours of fun!

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The white towers are scored, you can just make them out in the pic. All 24 are there.

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All of the towers are there, but you need to blow up the photo to see the white ones.

this is very well done, I like it a lot

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Wow, that was some dedication to the piece. Nice. I had read another post about the kerf being different so that’s a good example for reference. Different materials, I’m guessing, are going to vary as well. I haven’t done an inlay project yet, but it is on my list. Thanks for sharing your great project!

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So beautiful and detailed. I love it!!

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This is a treasure! Thank you for the details. It’s a wonderful project! Think I’ll correct myself … projects!

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