Why glue with dowels? Just glue the squares onto the maple substrate. Gluing up alternate thickness strips though shouldn't be all that difficult. You could I suppose lay waxed strips between the thickest strips so glue doesn't stick to them and they will be used to help you level them up. Dowels or biscuits registered off of the flat side would be another way of gluing the variable thickness strips together accurately. Then you could rip and reassemble.
Finally, if the playing surface is below the table level just cut them all into 64 squares and lay them as tiles. You could cut 33 of the black tiles and use the odd one as a spacer to help you locate and glue the black ones accurately onto the white substrate. Will you bore holes to accept pegged chess pieces? I find accurately locating that sort of hole pattern far more challenging. ----- Original Message ----- From: David Sexton To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2008 8:44 AM Subject: [BlindHandyMan] making a chessboard I'm going to make a table with a chessboard in the middle. I will use maple for the white squares and walnut for the black squares. The standard way to make a chess board is to cut the boards into strips, clue the strips so the colors alternate, crosscut the striped board, flip every other strip end for end and glue back together... Instant chessboard. This is perfect except here's the problem: I want to make an accessible chess board, most accessible chessboards have the black squares raised about an eighth inch above the white squares. Gluing up boards of different thicknesses is difficult at best. Drilling square holes is an option I suppose if I wanna drill 32 of them, but that probably won't look great. Most accessible chessboards I've seen have a solid particle board white backing with an overlay of usually plastic for the black squares. Not sure how easy it would be to cut such an overlay from plywood. Maybe I could have a backing of maple ply, drill holes in the center of each square, cut out walnut squares, drill holes in them and glue each square in place with a dowel to hold them in place, drill out the dowel when it drys... Any other ideas? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 270.5.6/1575 - Release Date: 7/26/2008 4:18 PM [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
