Titanium Chess Set

Day 3 is when I learned how to use the CNC lathe. A friend of mine was generous to spend a few hours running through all of the operations, carefully teaching me everything I needed to know while I watched over his shoulder. I had my first king piece at the end of day 3!

More progress was made on the lathe with the completion of the 4 rooks and 2 pawns. I also cut the next set of strips for the chess board and did the second glue-up for that. By this point, I had also gotten very good at truing the 4-jaw-chuck jaws around each new piece.

I spent about 12 hours in the shop on day 7 cranking out the rest of the 14 pawns and gluing up the border of the chess board. I also had just enough extra stock to make 2 more queens to complete the set. It was a long and awesome day.

With all of first lathe operations finally done, I spent the morning of day 8 grinding off all of the little nubs left by the parting tool on the bottom of each piece. This was a long but cool process that consumed a lot of sanding pads.

I also got to work finishing the queens and bishops in the mill using custom 3D printed soft jaw inserts to hold the pieces.

I tackled the milling of the knights on day 9. I used the rotary vise in the manual mill and rotated the vise around enough so that it left the piece looking like the head of a horse. I ended up narrowing the nose a little more than originally planned – partially because it looked better and partially because I cut too much on the first knight to achieve the initially intended shape (oops).

I did the last lathe operations on day 10 where I cut the bases off of the knights. I kept these on so that they could be gripped in the rotary vise, and now they were ready to get chopped off. I was careful to ensure the knights were true to center along the entire length, then I ran a parting tool operation to cut the base off.

Then, since all of the machining was completed, I got to anodize half of the pieces to make the set have two distinct colors. I individually cleaned each piece with acetone and placed it into a baking soda / de-ionized water solution that had a negative lead sitting in it. I touched the positive lead to the part in the solution and within seconds, it was anodized.

Day 11 was a day of finishing touches. I designed and cut out the foam insert that now safely holds each piece. I also sanded and waxed the chess board and started on the box that the foam sits in.