In this video I make a chess board.
In terms of materials for the chess board, I had four offcuts of mahogany, these are the feet from some salvaged hat and coat stands. And I had a piece of what I believe to be Iroko although I might be wrong - I've had this for a while and I don't remember where I picked this up.
First I needed to prepare the two materials. I started by flattening one edge and one face of the piece of Iroko on the planer and then I did the same with the mahogany.
Then I ripped the opposite face of the mahogany at the tablesaw to make it square.
And I ripped the piece of Iroko in half and then thickness planed the other faces and edges of the Iroko to the same size as the pieces of mahogany.
I then chopped the Iroko to length to be similar sized pieces as the mahogany using the mitre saw.
I also cleaned up the ends of the mahogany pieces
With all the pieces prepared I alternated the two woods ready for gluing up.
I used a couple of bar clamps for the glue up, and used a framing square to check the shorter pieces of iroko were level and then I could tighten the clamps and wipe away the excess glue with a damp cloth.
I then added some F clamps to make sure that the pieces were seated on to the bar clamps
Once the glue had dried I cleaned up the ends at the tablesaw using my panel sled.
And then I cleaned up the faces of the workpiece with my handplane.
Next I needed to cut the block in to strips. The tablesaw would have been the best tool to use for this but I used the bandsaw because the blade has a thinner kerf and I wanted to get as much material out of the block to work with as I could.
A little bit of blade drift on the bandsaw is inevtiable, especially when using a pretty dull blade like I am here, so before cutting the next strip I made sure to flatten the face of the block with the hand plane. I checked for flatness with a steel ruler and then I could cut the next strip and so on.
The bandsaw left a bit of tear out so I cleaned up each strip on the belt sander.
With all of the strips cut, I then made sure that they would all mate together properly by flattening the edges with a couple of strokes of the hand plane.
Next I could glue the strips together to create the chess board. I used a ruler to make sure the board was straight.
and I added clingfilm and a couple of small boards and F clamps again to make sure that the board would be as flat as possible while the glue set. The clingfilm was used just to stop the chess board sticking to the scraps of wood.
Once the glue had dried, I used a cabinet scraper to get rid of most of the excess glue and then I made sure the edges of the board were straight with my block plane.
I wanted to make a mitred trim for the board, and I had an offcut of oak which I'd use for that.
I cut the mitres at the mitre saw, and glued and taped them to the sides of the board.I used another mitre just to check that each corner would marry up well together
And once all four side were held in place with tape, I added some elastic bands and these would help to apply pressure and get nice tight joints
Once the glue had dried I then used my belt sander to flatten the board, clean up any dried up glue on the surface
and also get the trim flush with the board. I sanded both sides at 120 grit and then moved on to sanding with my orbital sander with 120 grit also.
I marked up the size of the board on to the ply and cut it out with the jigsaw making sure to keep on the outside of the pencil lines.
I applied glue to the face of the ply, spread it out and then used a couple of scrap boards to make kind of a sandwich which would
help to distribute the clamping pressure across the whole board. I used F clamps and couple of long reach C clamps to reach near the centre
With the glue dry I then used the hand plane to get the ply flush with the oak trim.
Then I added another mitred trim out of some offcuts of mahogany and this would hide the edges of the plywood.
I made this trim in the same way as I made the oak, so I didn't bother filming it in detail.
I brought the trim flush to the board with my block plane and then I added a decorative edge to the mahogany trim using my router.
I used some abrasive paper wrapped around a pencil to sand the profile left by the router bit.
I then sanded the board by hand at 240, 400, 600 and finally 1200 grit to get it nice and smooth.
The first coat of finish I used was Teak oil. Because this is an end grain board, the oil soaked in extremely quickly so I re-coated it once or twice straight away and then left it alone to soak in.
After applying oil, I decided to add a spray varnish, for a couple of reasons. Firstly as there'll be chess pieces moving around the board I wanted quite a hard wearing top coat of finish, and secondly I wanted a nice glossy sheen to the board.
In between each coat of spray varnish I sanded with 400 grit wet and dry paper to keep the surface nice and smooth before applying the next coat. It got three coats of the spray varnish in total.
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