Acrylic Chess

Hello everyone. After several episodes of the Queen's Move series, I had a desire to do something about chess. Without thinking twice, I decided to make chess pieces. I looked at what materials we have in our office. I found a fairly large 2mm piece of clear acrylic. I think it is perfect for making chess pieces.

I will cut everything out with a CO2 laser

https://www.endurance-lasers.com/products/an-endur...

I also highly recommend using a blowing nozzle to keep anything out of the lens. Also, when cutting, extremely unpleasant smoke comes from acrylic, so it is better to organize the extraction of this smoke somewhere farther away. For this I use a special box with a built-in hood.

Initially, the idea was to make shapes from 2 parts (round base and a shape inserted into the base). But it's good that I thought of going on the Internet and looking for ready-made models for cutting there. On one of the sites I found a layout that was different from my idea, but, in my opinion, it was even better.

https://rezkalaser.ru/chpu/3d-model-shahmatnye-figury/

As always, I threw everything into CoralDraw, made the required number of copies of each figure. Then I placed them as compactly as possible. The file is ready for cutting. But I will cut this acrylic for the first time, so it is necessary to determine the mode.

Greetings from the future: As a result, parts of the figures were easily disassembled. I recommend reducing everything by 20%. Probably this is due to the fact that the thickness of the acrylic is not exactly 2 mm

There is almost nothing to describe here. I took a small piece of material and, through trial and error, determined the parameters for high-quality cutting:

Power 100

Speed 380 mm / min

The focus is approximately in the middle of the material.

I put acrylic in the machine. I check if there is enough space for it and start cutting. These parameters are ideal for my machine. Therefore, if you want to repeat it, I advise you to check them first.

The CO2 tube has an operating temperature of 16-20 degrees. It needs to be supported. Now we have made our own cooling system.

But it still can't handle 100% of the laser power. Therefore, when the temperature rises to 20 degrees, it was necessary to stop the process and let the laser cool down.

This also took some time. With all this, it took me about 50 minutes to cut out 17 shapes.

Next, I cut out 17 more shapes for the opposing team. And for the sake of distinction, I just painted them with matte black paint.

Now I want to make a chessboard. First I wanted to make a board-box so that all the chess could be put in it. But I chose beauty, not practicality. And I will make the board flat with an engraved playing field. I again went to the Internet to look for ready-made files for cutting. But I found only more complex options, but there is simply no playing field. But not a problem, I can do it myself. After about 30 minutes, this is what I got.

I throw it in LightBurn and understand that I need parameters for engraving.

In 20 minutes I determined them:

• - speed 10000 mm / min
• - power 20%
• - focus on the acrylic surface
• - line frequency 0.1 mm

I level the acrylic in the machine. In the program, I divided the entire task into 3 parts.

1. For squares and coordinates, I set the fill mode 2. For the line showing the borders of the field, set the line mode 3. And the last I set the mode for cutting acrylic to cut the board All is ready. I start the engraving process. In this case, our system with a load of 75% kept the temperature around 18.5 degrees. This is just right. The whole process took about 40 minutes.

After operating the machine, everything must be washed with soap and a brush.

As a result, I received a complete set for playing chess.

Thanks to the ENDURANCE machines for these opportunities

https://www.endurance-lasers.com/