Giant Laser Cut Chess

We at JUMP wanted to have a delightful game to fill our lobby with a friendly competitive spirit to accompany the Olympic Events. A giant chess board was a great fit for this task. While chess can be played in a variety of formats and sizes, there is something intriguing and playful about moving giant sized pieces on a giant Chess Board

SIZE: King/Queen Height 27” - Pawn Height 18”. All chess pieces have 8” diameter crosspiece

• Laser Cutter (we use the Epilog Laser Fusion M2 with a 75 watt C02 laser)
• .25" plywood - about one sheet per piece
• Spray paint of your choice

We used .25" plywood for our chess pieces, which had a tendency to warp, particularly across the slit in the piece face. To counteract this warping tendency, we designed some solutions to secure the two faces in a perpendicular orientation. We decided to add our own cross piece that slid over the two faces to give the piece some structure and rigidity as well as to reference the traditional chess piece form. Every piece was designed with the same base, which was always the widest part of the piece. The cross piece was also standardized so that they are interchangeable across the pieces. This means that after the two faces are slotted together, the crosspiece cans slide down the length of the piece until it cinches at the base.

Our second addition was the “H joint” which helped secure the top half of the chess piece. Every chess piece had a slot in the top half of one face that fit the “H” shaped joining piece. The legs of the H project out far enough out to help constrain the potential warp of the other chess face.

After all the pieces were cut out and painted, the assembly went quickly. Align the two faces of the chess pieces perpendicularly and slot them together, making sure to insert the H joint before the slot is covered up. Then you should be able to slide the crosspiece down the middle. The gap in the crosspiece was barely wider than the thickness of the plywood, so it took a little finessing at times to get the piece all the way to the bottom. Once everything is fitted together, the pieces are rigid and stable. 

The knight is the one piece that required a modified approach. Since the horse form is wider than the base, the crosspiece could not be slid down over the top of it. Instead the cross piece is fitted onto the bottom of the horse and the intersecting side profile slides up through the crosspiece.

The chess board has been a big hit with the visitors in our lobby. Some fierce battles have already been fought over this board, and it is apparent by the destruction of several of our base cross pieces. The current shape might encourage our younger competitors to stand on them, which was certainly not what we were designing it in mind for. Future design modification possibilities could include slimming down the ring of the cross piece to make it clearer to potential users that it is an aesthetic component and not a functional step. Another idea is to simply remove it or replace it with the small H joint we did higher up on the chess pieces.

All in all, it was a fun project that engages the diverse range of visitors that come through JUMP.

Inspiration

We found fellow creators on this site that had already done a thorough job going through the process of making their own laser cut giant chess pieces. Jayefuu generously shared his own process and CAD files for laser cutting each of the pieces.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en 

This design is licensed under a cc-by-sa 4.0 creative commons license. Tag Make Studio JUMP as an author if you modify and reshare.

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