Monday 20 February 2012

Check And Mate

Recently I finished off what has to be my favourite project of 2012 (short list of projects thus far so choosing a favourite was really easy). 

In my basement there is this table and in this table are two glass inserts and on these inserts sat my brother and then there was my brother in the table.  OK so to make a complicated sounding sentence sound easy my brother sat on the table and broke it so it was then up to me to fix it.

So to solve the issue of a hole in the table I chose to go for something unique and visually very interesting.  A chess board.

So to begin: the insert couldn't be more then about 3/8" in thickness so that meant resawing maple and walnut stock down to roughly a quarter of an inch.  The design of the insert would be adhered to a 1/4" piece of mdf.  After the maple and walnut was adhered to the mdf I used a jack plane to thin out the insert.







After the walnut and maple had been resawed it was time to cut out all the squares for the playing field.  IT takes 64 squares to make a chess board (in this case 32 maple ones and 32 walnut ones) and each square needs to be dead on square and the exact same size. I used the table saw to roughly cut all 64 pieces to length and width.  Using the rip fence and a cross cut sled I got all the pieces close to 1 1/4" by 1 1/4"

After the table saw it was off to the shooting board to achieve perfect squareness and size.  I used a stop to make sure each piece would line up the same (side note I finally fixed my 90 degree shooting board)











With all the squares cut it was time to put the board together.  Using two trued pieces of wood I made a 90 degree corner.  Using carpenters glue I stuck one quarter of the board down to the mdf lining up the pieces against the wooden fences
After the first quarter was attached i moved on the rest of the board.
The Board ready for thicknessing.













I used a spokeshave (just for fun) to reduce the first run of decorative banding around the chess board.  In hindsight this was a bad idea as I ended up tilting the shave to much and tapering the banding.  What I should have done was finish attaching all layers of the banding first and then thicknessed all parts at the end.  O well.






The insert installed in the table next to the other still existing glass insert ( to be replaced soon).
















The finished chess board insert.  I used a coat of boiled linseed oil (first time using this product and loved it) followed by almost 20 coats of a wipe on polyurethane semi gloss finish.

So there it is a chess board coffee table insert.

Cheers
Hans Christopher

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