Making a chess set part 2 – The Bishop

Feeling good about how the king had gone, I set to work on the bishops.
I decided that the thing to do would be to turn 2 head-to-head in a single length of wood. This would mean I only pay the ‘cost’ of work holding once for two pieces.
As with the king, and all the pieces, this was simple between centres turning. No special chucks, I didn’t even need to engage the prongs on the 4 prong drive centre, the force of just the point and a live centre at the tailstock was sufficient to do all the primary turning. Though I did use a 4 jaw chuck to finish some pieces.

Turning head-to-head meant that whenever I set the calipers for a measurement I would be able to make it on both pieces, and save time.

Fairly quickly things looked like this

I was cautious about not making things too thin until I had to.
In particular doing the heavy wood removal to get things down to rough diameters before going too thin anywhere.

This was a balance of how close to complete I wanted to get them before I applied the finish, and how much would be left to refinish once actually split into separate pieces.

I decided to blend the heads into each other, to ensure that the top diameters would be the same

Once I finished and split the two pieces, I left them intending to finish them at home with a sander, and possibly my small chuck to help the process

What I realised was that the match wasn’t as close as I’d have liked, it wasn’t bad, but the thing that made it easier to get the kings matching was the ability to hold one up against the other.

I realised that I’d be better off turning different pieces in a single length. E.g. a bishop and a knight. That way I’d either be turning something for the first time, or I’d be able to compare to one already made.

So the next day when I went to turn a bishop in ebony, I actually combined it with turning a knight and a pawn. I did worry that the overall spindle might become too long, and vibrate too much. But the pawn being fairly small only added a little more.

In practice I did struggle a lot with bounce of the tool, due to the spindle flexing and vibrating under cutting. But mostly I was able to use very light cuts to diminish it, and sand away what was left.

Here we see the very early stages of setting out the pieces in a length of ebony.

You can see how I first went down the length marking and parting in to show the boundaries of the different body parts. One thing I did hit here is that you need to take your time. Once during the week I turned to take a measurement, turned back and started parting away material, only to realise too late I was one section further over than I should have been. All those sections can look very similar in the early stages. Lesson learned…take your time.

Here we can see how the bishop is exactly the same in this design to the knight, up to the head.

You can also see that the pawn was being turned on the end.

Again I worked through each piece forming the basic shape, working down to making the thinner sections. Rather than do one piece and then move to the next. Partly because I didn’t want a thin neck section already turned when I was taking heavy cuts on the next piece. Also because, being a set, they have elements which match, and so the measuring is common, at least for the base of each piece.

It was about this time that I hit a dilemma for my bishop. I made a shaping cut on the head of the black bishop. And found that I’d hit upon a shape and size which was bigger than the ones I’d already turned, which I preferred.
So I had to decide, do I carry on and turn it down to match the ones already done. Or decide to discard those two as practice and stick with the new shape.

Well since I’d not been terribly happy with how they’d gone, I decided I’d only regret it if I stuck with that shape. So I left the black bishop as the new template for the bishops.

Here we can see me turning another white bishop to match it, again I was turning a bishop head-to-head with a knight.

All the bishops I left with waste wood at the base, rather than completing them, since I knew I’d need to form the cut in the heads. And I’d probably need that waste wood to hold them firm. Not having any appropriate tools to do the job in France. I left them to finish at home.

My plan is to practice on the bishops that I turned first. To figure out what tool will work. Possibly a coping saw, making a fine cut. Or maybe a rotary tool, though I’m wary that rotary tools can easily skip away from where you want to carve.

I’ll update this page once I’ve completed the bishops to show the finished pieces. For now here are the ones I’ve done in their mostly finished state

Making a chess set. Part 1- The King

As a geek and a wood turner. One of the most obvious things to attempt to make on the lathe is a chess set.
In fact it was probably one of the first things I thought of to work towards. I did a lot of research at the time, and found that chess designs are not particularly readily available on line. At least not for free.
Though obviously there are plenty of pictures.

Realising that making a chess set was likely to be quite hard. I did not attempt to go straight for that, and actually left it to focus on other things, though my intention remained to attempt one when I got good enough.

Not last Christmas, but the one before, my lovely girlfriend decided to set me on the path to the chess set I’d talked about making, by giving me some sticks of ebony and boxwood with which to actually make a start. This was very cool, but faced with actual materials to start with, I was even more conscious that I wasn’t good enough to do a good job, and didn’t want to waste the gift.

A couple of weeks ago we went to France to visit Kat’s dad, and his workshop:-) -After over a year of not using my gift, I finally decided it was time to have a go. Spurred on by Kat saying she’d rather see the wood used for something than left gathering dust!

The first thing I needed to decide upon was  a design to go for. I didn’t want to do the classic ’standard’ style chess set. Mainly because I didn’t fancy having a go at the knights. But also because I wanted to try something a little different than the sets we already own.

Originally I tried to draw designs of my own based on things I half remembered seeing:

But I wasn’t very happy with them, then I came across this page Daydreams: turning my own chess pieces that contained some interesting links, and a picture of an unusual chess set at the top of the page, which apparently was “turned out of a piece of 13th Century Oak by an English turner on pages 30, 31 of Gareth Williams’ Master Pieces: The Architecture of Chess”
Like the author of that page I like the design and so I set to drawing it out as a schematic in my makers note book.

With designs in hand I set off to France with my ebony and boxwood, and my narrow parting tool. This turned out to be a good idea since Kat’s dad does not have one, and I used it for most of the sizing and laying out of the pieces. Pretty much everything else I turned with a smallish spindle gouge with a fingernail grind.

I decided to start with the king (uh huh)

The other important tool I took with me was a set of vernier calipers. With this I basically measured things right from my diagram on the page, locked them in, and transferred them to the wood. I started by measuring the distances between the major features, such as the widest points and the narrowest points. I actually used the points on the calipers to mark the wood transferring the sizes exactly.
I used the parting tool to carefully reduce the diameters for each section to the widest mark. Then part down to the narrowest points. before using the spindle gouge to form the curves.
I constantly turned to refer back to the design, and used the calipers to check sizing.

It did not take long before I had something that looked like my king design

I decided to finish with finishing oil, and here you can see it stood next to its drawing all finished.

Of course I knew I’d done the easy part. I’d made one piece. But it was pretty close to the intended design, so that was a good start.

The next day I set to work on the same design in ebony. The ebony was not as nice to work with, as it mostly came off in fine black powder, which turned my hands black. I obviously was concentrating as I failed to take any in progress pictures.
This time as well as referring to the design, I often held the white king up to the in progress black king to compare against what I actually ended up with, not just what I’d intended. This helped get some of the curves to match.
Ultimately I ended up with something which I feel matches pretty well.

And so I was started on my way to a chess set of my own.

In part two, I’ll look at the bishops.

Refinishing chairs

For a long time I’ve not pulled my weight in the “cooking a meal for the family” stakes. Based solely on the excuse that I don’t have a dining table or chairs. So I’ve been content to go to my brothers’ houses and enjoy their hospitality, but when it came my turn it was always out for a meal somewhere. But no longer! I have been keeping an eye out for a table for a while, flip-flopping between looking at new or second hand. Then a couple of weeks ago a table and chair turned up on a for-sale forum at work for £30. I figured at that price it had to be worth a go. The table is a nice mahogany colour and the chairs were painted black.

Now I have nothing against painted wood as such, however the paint was a little worn in places and I decided to look at stripping them down. I figured I could re-paint if the wood turned out to be cheap stuff that needed painting. But when I sanded away the paint under the seat, it showed through a nice grain.

I have no idea what the wood is, but I figured it would be worth stripping all the paint. I tried a little with a heat gun, and sandpaper, but it was not as easy as I’d hoped. So I switched to paint stripper. This was also not as easy as I’d hoped, but it was faster than the other options. The instructions said to apply and wait 20 minutes before rubbing it down with wire wool. I found that it was actually much more effective to start with the wire wool immediately after application. Perhaps it helped to work the solution into the paint better? In any case the first few attempts with paint stripper were not that effective, but once I’d got the hang of it things went faster.

Since the legs of the chair are just tapered cylinders, I decided to mount them on my lathe to sand them down. This made them much faster to deal with, and allowed me to get a good finish. The down side of that was needing to do a similarly thorough job of sanding the rest of the chair. All in all it took longer than I’d have liked, given I have another 3 to do, but I think I’ll be able to do the next one faster. And in any case it wasn’t so long as to be unfeasible to complete the job. Just a little time consuming. To finish the job I applied a wax finish that also stained a medium oak colour. I’ve never used this kind of finish before, and I was unsure about it as I applied it. The colour looked wrong, and particularly next to the bare sanded wood I thought maybe this was a bad idea. However once finished, and rubbed down, I decided it has made quite a nice finish for the chair.

I probably should have tried to match the table in colour, but I quite like oak, and have a number of other oak things around the house. So I guess my bias made me pick medium oak. Sat next to the table I don’t think it looks too bad in its surrounding.

Streptohedrons

A couple of months ago David Springett came to the Hampshire woodturners monthly meeting and gave a demonstration. Amongst the things he demonstrated were what he called ’streptohedrons’
I wrote about them at the time, as I was inspired a great deal by his demonstration. They are cool because the shapes you achieve are interesting and complex, but the method is relatively simple to understand.

You take 2 pieces of wood of the same size, with nice flat square faces and glue them together with a piece of newspaper in between. This is a paper join. You then mount the piece between centres along the glue join, being careful that you don’t just split the piece along the join when mounting it.

Then turn a shape in this piece. The only important thing is that what ever shape you turn you need to control what the cross section through that paper join looks like. It must have rotational symmetry. In its most simple form you turn a cone. A cone has a triangular cross section, and turned correctly, that triangle can be made to be an equilateral triangle and hence have rotational symmetry.
The cool thing is that the principal applies to any shape you can think of that has rotational symmetry.

Having been inspired by the theory I decided to have a go. The first challenge is actually getting two blocks with flat surfaces that will produce a nice flat join. David said that for this you really want a planer-thicknesser that can just give you a smooth flat surface to work with. Unfortunately these are very expensive, and I don’t have one.

What I do have is a bench belt and disc sander. And the belt sander does a reasonable job of getting a flat smooth surface. Though it is pretty hard to actually get it flat over a large piece. However having done the best I could I set about gluing the two pieces together. Unfortunately I didn’t have any news paper, and resorted to using a piece from the back on an envelope. This was not a good idea.

Once it had dried I mounted it on the lathe and set to work turning a cone shape. Just as I was starting to form the shape it PINGED into two flying pieces. (Always wear your face mask!)
It seems that paper from the back of an envelope is too thick, and did not help form a strong enough join.

Fortunately every Thursday I get a free paper delivered which normally goes straight in the recycling. This time I saved some, and started again.

This time I turned the glued up block down to a cylinder, measured the diameter and set to work on the maths. Another thing I love about this (because I’m a geek) is that it requires some Pythagoras’ theorem. And this means I can hark back to the glory days of GCSE mathematics when I was actually good at it. Before the rude awakening that was A-level maths. Who needs to know areas under graphs anyway? You can’t use that in wood turning.

It would probably have been easier to figure out the nearest whole numbers that I could work with. But I figured I’d make the biggest thing I could in the diameter. All of this good maths just to figure out how tall to make the cone.
With that established and marked, all you have to do is turn a straight line between the bottom max diameter and the top at which you should reach a point.

I discovered at this point that I had not been sufficiently careful about lining up my centre points on the glue join, and the tip of my cone was slightly into one side and not the other.

However the magic of sanding allowed this to turn into an acceptable streptohedron anyway

They make quite cool things for just fiddling with. I have this on my desk at work. Though David demonstrated techniques for hollowing them out to make little boxes, held together by rare earth magnets.

Having mastered the basic shape, I decided to go for something more complicated. In this case an octagon, which is turned as a sort of barrel shape.

This involved more maths. But really the same sort of thing. This time I decided it was easier to pick a starting edge size, and figure out if the cylinder I had was large enough. I tried a couple of different starting numbers until I found the largest that would fit in the diameter I had. I’m sure there are simpler ways to figure it out, but I couldn’t be bothered to go looking them up.

Having split it, this shape actually has two positions it could be re-joined at that result in different shapes.
This first is this

Which is pretty cool, but I preferred the second option

Which is the one I glued it as. Again once you get to this kind of shape, the idea of using small rare earth magnets is a good one, because then you can rotate to any of the alignments you like, rather than fixing one forever.

I think next time I shall try one of the harder ’star’ cross section pieces, that give pronounced spirals when formed as streptoheadrons. Or possibly have a go at hollowing out one of these shapes to make a small box. Not sure what you could put in such a box, but I guess the interesting part is the challenge of making it.

DIY lathe dust extractor hood

Last year I bought myself a serious dust extractor for use in the workshop. It has a huge dust collection bag and a 100mm hose.
I have it sat between my bandsaw and my lathe. The bandsaw has a specific dust port for connecting this type of extractor to which makes life easy. The lathe on the other hand is not so easy.

Basically I set it up with some garden wire providing a wire loop hanging off the bed bars, which I could hang the hose end in, which left it pointing vaguely where I was working. Whilst this seems fairly rubbish, the extractor is powerful enough that it was still effective at sucking up all the dust from sanding etc.

Although it has been effective, it was not really a satisfactory solution. The hose gets in the way, and often wound up not really pointing where I wanted it.

I looked around for ideas for dust collection hoods that would provide a more sophisticated solution. I found generic dust hoods for connection to 100mm hoses, but they seem to be fairly expensive for a shaped bit of plastic, which I’d still need to mount in something.

Having not really found anything that was quite what I wanted, and certainly nothing in a ’sensible’ price range. I decided to make my own.

So I hunted around my garage to look at what I had that might work as materials for this project. I quickly found a piece of plywood, about 5mm that looked like it would fit the bill. I also had a suitable size stick of something like pine, that was already planed and squared that looked good for a support baton which would get bolted to the bed bars.

The top of the plywood already had a big circle cut out from a previous project, and I decided that I could use that arc cut out of the headstock end, and just cut another section to the same dimensions for the other end. It has to be said I didn’t really bother to stop and figure out dimensions. I probably should of, but I basically went on what looked right, and I could keep sizing things up against the lathe to get a good idea.

Once again I really appreciated my bandsaw for making this project pretty trivial, it was very quick to cut up sections to size. Once I had the two end sections I decided to cut an angle on what would be the back top corner. And rather than measure to get it right on both ends, I just cut them both at once. For an exact match.

Then I just set the fence width to match the length from bottom corner to the corner of the diagonal cut, in order to cut the width of board for the back, and similarly set the fence for the angled top section. At this point I’d not settled on how wide I’d make the whole assembly, I basically set the ends on the lath to get a reasonable idea of what I wanted, and just cut both the back and top boards to match.

The idea was to just nail the left hand side to the pine stick which would have a channel drilled out so that it could be bolted to the bed bars just like my tool rest. Again I didn’t really measure, I just set it against the lathe to get an idea for how long to make the channel to get the range of movement I wanted.

I cut another piece of the pine to the same length for the right hand panel to nail to, and decided I’d just connect the rest with hot melt glue. Since it would be fast.

First things first I needed to cut out a channel in the right hand side that would allow my live centre tail stock to pass through, in this way I should be able to set the hood over at least the end of what ever I work on. If I have to work on something long enough that this end needs to be as wide open as the left hand side, I may adjust it then. For the moment I’d rather keep it as enclosed as possible,

This picture just showed me sizing it up against the tailstock to make sure everything was going to fit.

So now for the more complicated bit. Obviously I need some way for the hose to attached to this contraption. My idea was to make a ring that I would glue to the back board, which the hose would fit snugly over. For this I found myself a piece of MDF glued up to a block thickness that would give enough purchase for the end of the hose. Basically my hose has a few plastic guards that form a cross in the hoseway to stop big items getting sucked into the mechanism. These where set about an inch and a half back from the end of the hose, so I got a block of mdf about that thick to give it maximum interlocking space.
As it happened I had a lump of MDF laying around already glued into a block of just the right size. So I didn’t need to wait for any glue to dry. ( This is why I don’t throw anything away!)

Having got the block, I mounted it on the lath and turned it down to the correct diameter.

Here I’m checking it against the hose itself, you can see the plastic guards I was talking about.

Now all I had to do was hollow through it to form a ring. I wanted to leave enough wood to make it a pretty solid ring. I would after all be connecting and disconnecting the hose as I use it with other machines, so I want it to survive. But at the same time I’m conscious of the fact that these kinds of extractors are not designed to have their airways reduced. They lose suction, since it’s more about high volume of air, not high pressure of air. Which is the main difference between one of these and a regular ‘vac’
Anyhow I once again settled on a ‘by eye’ feel for what would work and set to hollowing

And once I was happy with the ring shape, I parted it off and was left with a nice neat MDF ring of just the right size.

With the ring formed I placed it roughly where I wanted it on the backboard, and drew a circle for it’s internal diameter. Which I then needed to cut out of the board. For this I decided to just use my drill press to drill a bunch of holes all the way round the circle, then just use a chisel to cut the connecting bits

This wasn’t terribly neat, but it was fast and easy. I just couldn’t be bothered to get my jigsaw out, even though it might have made a neater hole. I just used a bit of rough sandpaper to smooth the worse of the rough edges and plowed on.

I glued the ring in place at around this hole. I had actually tapered the ring slightly so that the fit on the hose would get tighter as it went over, So I was careful at this stage to glue the wider edge to the board.

With that clamped in place, I decided I was too impatient to really wait several hours for the wood glue to dry, so I got out my hot melt glue gun and set it warming up.

This is the first time I’ve really used my glue gun for a project like this. I’ve read variously of them being used to form quick glue chucks which can then be re-heated to remove later, and so I figured it would be easily strong enough for my needs.

I added a little hot glue around the ring against the board. And let it dry whilst I got together the other panels.

Hot melt glue made this bit really fast and easy, just run a line of glue along the joins and hold for a few seconds before moving on.
And before you know it, you’ve got a dust extractor hood!

I think it’s taken me almost as long to write about this as it took me to get this far actually making it. It really was very quick to put together. And I was keen to put it in place and have a go.
I had ummed and ahhed about putting a ‘floor’ in place, vs just leaving it open. In the end I decided to cut a panel to size, but not glue it in initially to see how I got on.

This is it in place, it only gets bolted on the left hand side, the right hand is just resting on the bed bars.

Next I attached the hose to the back, which was a bit fiddly because it’s quite a tight space, and the host isn’t all that flexible for tight 90 degree bends.

With everything in place I decided it was time to give it a whirl. And so I switched everything on and attempted to sand the piece of mdf still on the lathe. This worked great! I could just make out a steady stream of fine mdf dust going straight into the extractor. Wanting a more visually obvious demonstration I decided I’d just a tool to see how it handled larger bits being cut off.

At this point I discovered the first thing I’d not taken into account. I went to move the tool rest into place, and realised it hit the bottom of the back board. So I couldn’t get the tool rest in position properly. I was now glad I had not glued the ‘floor’ in place, and the adjustments became obvious.
Cut a section out of the bottom of the back board, big enough to allow the tool rest clearance to move around. Then set the ‘floor’ at an angle up towards the hole.

Some quick adjustments later and I ended up with what is now a finished extractor hood.

I’ve now had it in use a few times, and love it. It does a great job of sucking up a lot of the debris coming off the lathe. Obviously the large chunks tend to go all over, but mostly it’s the dust and finer pieces I’m interested in capturing, and it does this without the hose getting in my way.

The couple of issues I have is that it’s a bit slow to attached and remove, and since it only bolts on one side, the hose occasionally pulls it enough to twist the whole thing. I’m not sure if I will do something about that or just live with it. If I add another bolt it will just get even slower to setup and take down.

Generally this was a great little project. Very quick to put together and very cheap, given I used materials I already had laying around as effectively scrap. And I hope that it will help my dust extractor be even more effective when I’m using the lathe, which can only be a good thing.