This project is already completed, but I didn’t have this website running at the time, so this is just a transfer of my notes and files with this project.
My advisor when I was in 10th grade was retiring, and the advisory group decided to make him a chess set, as that was his favorite board game.
We split up the group into who would do what: I got the role of making the individual chess pieces. I decided that I would go with checkers style flat pieces, one side would be blank for checkers, the other would have the corresponding chess piece on it.
I thought this design was good for two reasons:
- The board can now support two different games
- I get to play with the brand-spanking new laser cutter.
For the majority of the pieces, I just downloaded the files from Google Images and called it a day. However, since my school, Pingree, has the logo of a pegasus, I thought that would fit nicely as the knight of the set. I imported all of these images into inkscape, and drew a red circle on top of each of the pieces, as shown below:
I kept the circles a different color so I could apply a different power and speed setting in the laser cutter software: this allows the laser cutter to both engrave and cut the pieces.
Next, we took the different types of wood and ran some engraving patterns on them to see which combination of laser translational speed and power would be ideal for each type of wood:
Afterwards, we quickly cut out the pieces, gave them to our resident wood expert, and the rest they say, is history:
