Aslan's nordic inspired chessboard

History

I was very fortunate to get my first 3D printer in late 2020 (Prusa i3 Mk3). Of course while waiting it to arrive I was browsing things to print and getting inspired what I could do with it. My friend asked me to print him a chess set. While I was browsing the thingiverse I also saw files for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_chessmen for print. I thought that I wanted set for myself, but I had no board that would make those beautiful models justice so I had to design my own. I thought of “nordic rune" style line art since those original pieces might be originally from viking traders.

It took a long while to actually get it done. I think I started to design the board in  late 2021 and actually print it in early 2022. My original attempt at it was tiny bit flawed. I designed a board square that was not symmetrical on every axis, but I was already printed few pieces so I decided to still go on with it. That's what you can see there as the completed board and it uses the “bonus_a” and “bonus_b” models. I also was quite unfamiliar how I should go about it so the stl models for those are very inefficient as they are. I would not recommend to print this one since you need to pay attention to the orientation :)

I was also dreaming of making this a multimaterial print originally, but there was two things that made it impossible at the time: Squares had to be very large to get chessmen to fit onto them and that makes it impossible to fit onto the print bed in one go. Printing multimaterial with the Prusa i3 Mk3 was not really feasible. At the time I was dreaming about the newly announced prusa XL (still am :)).

About printing and assembly

Board dimensions are 34 by 34 cm with sides and 32 by 32 cm without sides.

For anyone considering printing this I would recommend to stick to the revised version: There's three different squares, basic (the simplest), basic with small inner circle and double. You can either print a board with just one style or mix and match styles if you feel like it, but the lines in that case might not always match.

For a finished board you need to print:
- 64 printed squares, 32 of each color.
- Sides if you want them

Infill was the default 15 % as far as I remember and layer height was 0.2mm. Printing squares as single pieces is a lot of work, but since the single piece is so small it'll usually not suffer that much from curling/lifting of the bed.

Before sticking everything together I recommend checking the chessboard pattern just in case

I just used ca glue to stick the squares and sides together. Honestly, that is quite a lot of gluing, so if you are going with that route, then you might want to make some sort of gluing jig from the start.


Some ideas
For me symmetry works best, since this is chess afterall, but you don't need to align every piece the same way - it can make quite interesting patterns that way.

If I did this again, I probably would design the sides so that they lock together and could maybe hold onto the loose squares. That way you could change the pattern inside of it if you feel like it.

I used wood filled filament on my print and I think it really worked well, so that might be something for you to consider here as well.

Assembly takes some effort, so this could be really cool multimaterial print if you have the printer for it.

Thanks for checking this out and I hope it brings you joy or inspiration!