The Art and Process – May 2026

Have you ever wondered chess sets might cost as much as they do? Do you think that they are grossly overpriced? If so, have you had the opportunity to appreciate what goes into making a custom-made chess set? If you have answered “yes”, “yes” and “no” then let me explain what is required for a craftsperson to make a quality chess set. By ‘chess set’ I mean the board, pieces and a box for storing the pieces.

In this post I will describe the process I followed to craft a custom chess set for another person starting with a description of the materials used followed by the process for each of the board, pieces and the storage box. I conclude the post by describing some of the lessons learned while making this set.

Materials

I prefer to make my items from recycled or sustainably obtained materials except for items such as brass fittings and polished/finishes. However, there are times when I have to purchase wood so I seek out timber yards who stock sustainably harvested product.

Australia has some of the most beautiful and also hardest native timbers in the world. Some timbers, notably redgum and turpentine, were used for utilitarian purposes such as fence posts, railway sleepers or marine jetty pylons. Recycling these timbers is valuable to preserve the beauty of the wood in more useful pieces rather than committing them to the fireplace.

All wood for this set is recycled. The whites squares and pieces are from a grey box (Eucolyptus Microcarpa) tree from a farm near St Arnoud in central Victoria. It had died and fallen so the farm owner cut a section and delivered it to me. The ‘black’ squares and borders are from redgum (Eucalyptus Camaldulensis) fence posts salvaged from nature strips in Melbourne suburbs.

Hinges and clasps for the box are solid brass and obtained from a furniture maker in Hawthorn VIC.

Various products were used and experimented with to ‘finish’ the box ie polishing namely; tung oil, mineral turpentine, wax polishes, varying grades of sand paper up to 1200 grit.

The work was done either at my home workshop or at my woodworking club, Waverley Woodworkers Inc.

The Board

The board is made from recycled redgum fence posts and grey box. The squares are redgum and grey box and the border is redgum. The inlay surrounding the squares is both redgum and grey box.

The grey box was delivered to me as a log so it had to be milled to strips 50mm x 450mm to be made into squares. Milling was done firstly on a jointer to create a flat base to enable thinner fillets to be cut on a band saw. The log was only 300mm in length so two lots of strips were cut and glued end-to- end.

The redgum fence posts were firstly, checked for metal eg nails, screws, before being cut to the 50mm x 450mm strips.

Playing area

The strips were laid out alternatively for gluing together. Once the glue had cured the strips were rotated 90º and cut in 50mmmm wide strips and flipped to form the chequerboard playing area. They were then glued to a substrate of 7mm plywood and processed through a thicknesser to level the surface.

Inevitably, unprocessed wood will have defects of various sorts – splits, gum veins, grub tunnels. Some of these can be left as a feature of the wood while others should be ‘repaired’ either by filling with a wood filler or plugs cut from the same or similar wood blocks. This board had a number of grub tunnels that were filled with plugs.

Border

The border is redgum, again, recycled from discarded fence posts. After being milled to size they were made into a frame using mitre joints and glued to the board using several clamps. The mitres are reinforced by hidden splines with the grain running across the joint which is stronger than running with the joint.

Finish

The final phase in making the board is the finish. The surface was smoothed with an orbital sander to 240 grit and then by hand to 1200 grit which produces an excellent display of the wood’s grain.
Then, about ten layers of diluted boiled linseed oil were applied to preserve the wood; oil penetrates the wood as opposed to a polyurethane varnish which forms a coating on the surface. The next step was to apply several applications of a carnauba wax polish. Carnauba wax is the hardest of the wax polishes but while creating a better appearance and showing off the grain in the wood, it is not as durable as polyurethane and therefore needs treating with respect. The payoff is that it is easier to repair scratches etc simply by using a commercial furniture polish.

A Problem with the Board

However, the board developed two defects. The first defect, one of the border lengths bowed approximately 1.5 – 2mm and could not be straightened despite using different techniques involving steam, heat and clamping for lengthy periods. The second defect, the centre of the playing area developed a dip of about 2.5mm and again, despite several attempts, it could not be rectified.

In short, this board was not acceptable to deliver to a new owner, so a second board was made.
After further research and conversations with other woodworkers, the second board had significant changes. The hardwood strips for the squares to milled to approx. 8mm thickness. Despite best efforts, the playing surface is rarely smooth when glued to the substrate so it was expected that it would be processed through a thicknesser to reduce it to approximately 4mm thickness.

The second change was to make the playing area substrate using 12mm medium density fibreboard (MDF) because it is more stable than plywood as it has no grain. However, it does require coating on all surfaces with a heavily diluted glue to reduce any likelihood of damage through moisture ingress. When finally assembled the underside of the substrate was given three coats of wipe-on poly.

One result of these two changes is that the border is thicker, from approximately 16mm to around 21 mm resulting in a heavier but more formidable looking board. In all other respects it is identical to the first.

Pieces

As with the board, the pieces were made from recycled wood – redgum and grey box.. The logs and fence posts were milled to blanks ≈ 40mm square and lengths appropriate for each piece with the kings being approximately 110mm in height down to the pawns at ≈ 80mm.

Each piece was started on the lathe but the knights were finished using a bandsaw and then re-inserted to the lathe for final shaping manually using chisels, knives, rasps and/or sandpaper.

While redgum is quite stable and generally free of defects grey box is less so. It happens that when turning grey box defects such as splits or grub tunnels will appear but were not initially visible on the blank. Common results of these defects include the piece breaking apart entirely or partially or simply resulting in a hole in the wood. Sometimes a shattered piece can be glued together providing all the broken bits can be found (??) or newly discovered holes can be filled with epoxy or wood filler (I prefer epoxy as it is harder). But sometimes, the best approach is to discard that piece and start another as happened with a couple of pieces.

The Storage Box

The box for storing the pieces is made from recycled redgum with the light coloured accents being grey box.

The side and end panels were cut each end at 45º to form mitre joints which were glued and held in place with strap clamps. The mitre joints are reinforced with corner splines made from grey box. Because I had no timber wide enough to form for each of the top and bottom from a single piece I had to glue several lengths together and then cut to size before gluing to the bottom and top of the box.

The box was then cut through at the mid point to form the two sections for each set of pieces. The most difficult (and tedious) action here was fitting the hinges and latches. These must be perfectly fitted at 90º to the box frame to ensure that the two sections remain perfectly aligned. As power tools sometimes can be unnecessarily aggressive, leading to minor disasters, I used an old hand operated drill to make holes for screws. To further assist aligning the two box sections, guide pieces were glued to the inside surface of the bottom section.

The pieces are set in medium density foam’ beds’ which were hand cut for each piece as no two pieces are exactly the same size – they are truly unique!

As with the board, the box was finished with several applications of boiled linseed oil and then several applications of a carnauba wax polish.

Summary

Any woodworking/woodturning project requires a minimum of four skill sets:

• Intellectual primarily for design but also for assessing how each piece of wood could be used successfully.
  
• Knowledge for understanding how to implement the design as well as determining an efficient workflow. Knowing wood technology such as hardness, structure, grain direction, elasticity is also necessary.
  
• Manual skills for physically creating the project such as measuring, cutting, shaping, refining, sanding and finishing.
  
• Problem solving for fixing the inevitable screw-ups and minor disasters which involves drawing on the previous three skillsets. However, a dictum of woodworking/woodturning is that there are no disasters but opportunities for redesign. Sadly, in some cases the only redesign opportunity is to convert the piece to quality firewood.
  

As with most activities, woodworking and woodturning require continual learning and improvement. This project was no exception although it is the twelfth chess set I have made and still learning.

Further requirement are patience and persistence. Nothing should be rushed as measurements, lengths, breadths and angles must be spot on. Repairs can take time especially if wood should be colour matched or plugs need cutting or patches need colour matching and fitting. Errors can be very frustrating but will not fix themselves and the first attempt at repair may not be satisfactory.

In all, this project took about 70 hours actual time to complete.

In this project I learned two things:

1. In the first board I used a 7mm plywood substrate which developed a fault. In the second board I made the substrate from 12mm MDF. As MDF has no grain it should not warp or dip.
   
2. To fit the playing area to the frame (border) rather than the reverse which I had done previously. Mitre joints look easy but can be problematic. I found it is better to make the frame getting the lengths and 45° angles correct. One must assume that any power mitre saw or hand cut angle will not be exactly 45° so it is preferable to get the board correct and then trim the playing area to fit.