Raised Square Chess Board

Paduk with Curly Maple and Cherry squares. 14”x14”. Squares are 1.5”. 3 coats satin Poly.

The design caused a couple of assembly challenges. The biggest two were how to align squares to each other and then how to clamp them individually during glue up. The indexing proved relatively simple to solve. I made a steel “X” that was wide enough to span 2 blocks, set the first 2 and then indexed the rest…2 at a time. I had to think about the clamp method a little more and ultimately came up with a cantilever clamp arrangement that actually worked quite well.

Also, I couldn’t risk any squeeze out of the glue from beneath each block. So I routed a “glue mote” around the bottom side of each block. I applied glue to the square, flat area interior to the groove. When the glue inevitably squeezed, it was caught in the mote and held underneath the block. No glue is visible and best of all…no cleanup around the blocks!

To finish between the squares I wrapped my cloth around a card scraper, dipped it in the Poly and slid it between the blocks. I didn’t bother sanding between the blocks during finishing because the surface texture is not noticeable at all so I saved myself the work.

I am really happy with it despite some frustrating moments of a big mis-cut that required a new paduk strip to be glued onto the base and blended in and a few other minor errors. Going back to check the squareness of the blocks, I can insert the steel alignment “X” into every intersection except one! A block must have walked on me during glue up and I missed it…but without the “X”, I can barely tell where that spot it.

The pieces I purchased online. (the light pieces are not nearly as yellow in person as they show in the pics.)

Hope you like.

Thanks for looking and for all the help as I was planning this.

Greg

-- "Hey, you dang woodchucks! Quit chuckin' my wood!"