Travel Chess Set

I got bored the other week and decided to design a chess set.
I decided I wanted to make the chess set quite small and travel size but didn’t want to lose the natural feel that you get from playing on a full-size board.

I conquered this by making a folding wooden chess set. All pieces and the board will be made out of wood and will be somewhat magnetic to make sure the pieces don’t go flying around in the car… I guess I might be the only one that tries to play chess in a car…

After I wrote down all of the must haves and a few wants I went to town designing. I drew up a rough sketch of what I thought the final design might look like and jumped right into Solidworks to start designing some pieces.

At the time I only had access to a few machines that could achieve the design, the main one I used was the Carvey by Inventables. This allowed me to achieve most of what I needed with a bit of hand finishing later on.

The chess pieces in Solidworks were used as blanks to ensure the right amount of room was on the inside but the final piece design was taken from another maker Beyond Design with their pieces published on the projects space run by Inventables. Here is a link the their project https://www.inventables.com/projects/chess-set

After I modelled the board in Solidworks I used an add-in to convert the parts into SVG files that the Carvey software can understand.

So with all of that here is the final product!

One last minute thing I added was a foam holder for the inside of the box. This was to stop the pieces rattling around inside, and to make sure I hadn’t lost any pieces in the car…

If you would like to make something similar let me know and I can send you through the design files.
Happy Making!