English Chess Forum

Is it allowed to discuss here about making chessmen and chess boards?

I should hope so, we might all of us need something to do

Tell us more, Anthony. I've got a bit of wood lying about after the recent storms.

Reminds me that I saw this plasticine board and pieces, with instructions, in a book in a school library last month

I don't want to post the whole thing online (I wouldn't mind posting a couple more pages, but for some reason my favoured image-saving site is on the blink this evening and I've run out of patience) but if anybody is actually interested in, e.g., making this with their kids, I could send them the instructions and photos. (Or you could buy the book.)

That does look like fun - but if you actually tried to play with it, I reckon the pawns would be very confusing.

Making chessmen and chess boards
Is that not sexist? Should the thread not be Making chess pieces and chess boards

I think this is the one to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtWwny8-yX4&t=8s

Try walnut wood offcuts? :: heartwood for the black pieces, sapwood for the white pieces; for the white pieces use a varnish that does not darken the wood.

But the real challenge is, even if you do make your own board and set, then decide to give a friend a game on it to see how it feels, what do you do then? You put all that time into those pieces but never really know what to do with them on the board you made also.

I have an old wooden (largely lathe turned) chess set. The white pieces are some sort of pale hardwood, perhaps beech. (The black pieces are likely the same but heavily painted black.) The knights were made in two pieces, a turned base and a head cut from wood sheet, as anyone knew who had carried out the move "N(head)-c3 : N(base) stayed at b1". In most of the white pieces, the heart (the place in the middle of all the annual rings) ran up-and-down through the axis of the chess piece, as if it was lathe-turned from very thin branchwood. This would not work with walnut, which at its heart has a wide soft pith tunnel, and a strong tendency, as it dries out, to shrink much more in circumference than in radius, thus causing radial checking (USA) / starshakes (UK).

To add a literary skein to this simple homespun thread see -

https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=821356298