Soren Sabet Sarvestany

      For the final individual project in my CAD course at George Brown College, I decided to build a chess set.

Each piece was individually designed in Solidworks as an assembly of three parts – the front view, the side view, and the circular base.
 

 

       Since the material being used was 1/8” (0.125”) thick acrylic, the pieces were designed to slide into each other. The openings of the cutout on each piece was initially designed as 0.125”, but a test run on white acrylic proved that this was too wide, and did not provide a tight enough fit between the front and the side views.The distance was reduced to 0.105”, and the front & side views as well as the bases were laser cut on 1/8” thick green acrylic.My original plan was to paint the green acrylic (hence why there were 4 pieces of each colour in the last picture) but I decided that it would be wiser to laser cut the 16 pieces on 1/8” purple acrylic.

 

       The chessboard was created by making the chessboard pattern on a 2D plane in solid works, then extruding every other square by 0.005”, resulting in a grid pattern. The top view of this model was then sent to a drawing, and all the squares that were extruded 0.005” were shaded gray. This file was exported to Adobe Illustrator, and the pattern was etched by the laser cutter onto a particleboard. The etching took 20 minutes to complete. The board was then cut to size using a band saw. Afterwards, the front, side and bases of the individual peices were glued together with crazy glue.

 

       One issue encountered was that the front cut-out of the pawns was too thin, resulting in several parts breaking. Should future iterations occur, the pieces will be thickened to reduce the probability of breakage. Another issue encountered was that it was difficult to glue the pieces to the bases accurately. This can be corrected in future iterations by including square extrusions on the bottom of the front and side views of each piece which can then slide into 4 precut holes (with the same dimensions) on the base. Also, once the protective coating is peeled off the acrylic, the sliding fit is not tight enough to hold the pieces together. In future iterations, the width of the slot will be reduced from .105” to .100”.