Completing an Old Project

 I had a really old chess board.  It was definitely nothing to write home about.  It was poorly made, and barely even in dimension.  I should know, I made it when I was in grade 9 in wood shop class at school.  It was the first piece of wood work I'd ever done, so it's only expected to be rough.

Apparently, I have never done things normally.  The projects are for complete, one piece boards.  Yet on mine, I wanted a folding board, and that's what I built.  Some of the squares were split and re-glued but not planer enough to even keep the squares flat.  I had a border and brass hinges that weren't even straight (the thing folds up at an angle).

I figured it was time for the chess pieces. It's a small board, with squares that were 1", so the pieces all had to be less than 1" in any horizontal position (e.g. 1" diameter or less on the kings base).  I managed to find a chess set that was really old (I had a magnetic one as a gift from my dad in middle school), and that was missing a pawn.  I first made a test run with that missing pawn, casting it in silicone.

With that done, I set about creating molds for all of the pieces.  I went with green and gold, because those were two colors at the time that I loved.  I had to repeat a lot of pieces over and over to get the count (I'm not making 8 molds for 8 pawns).  I used a Dremel to cut off the bottom sprue from the pieces, and then set it up.

Nice to have that completed.