From The Workshop: Man Ray Style Chessboard

February 19, 2020

From The Workshop: Man Ray Style Chessboard

I speed-built this chessboard so I don't have any in-progress pictures.

Last year, my mom bought a Man Ray designed chess piece set from the MOMA as a gift for my dad. The accompanying board was out of stock and she couldn't find any boards sized correctly for the pieces in the right style. She wondered if I would be able to make one for less than the $250 MOMA was asking for when it went back in stock.

Part of the problem my mom was having is that most chessboards are made from painted plywood with a wood frame. I've never built a chessboard, but a frameless board would either need to be glued up from multiple pieces of solid wood, like a butcher-block, or plywood with an "invisible" edging like the style on the right, but with the solid edge cut flush with the panel edge after glueup.

I only thought of that second option after I planned my project, so... oops. It would certainly be easier and more dimensionally stable. Regardless, I happened to have a ton of european beech (the wood used in the chess set), so it made perfect sense to make the board out of wood. You know, apart from the inherent problems with any "thin" glue-up panel like splitting, cracking, warping, bowing, and the occasional wood stress explosion (actually happened to some youtube woodworker).

To avoid some of the problem, I decided to do the board in strips instead of individual squares. The strips would be the same width as the square sides so theoretically, I could offset the every other strip bu the square size and mask in a straight line:

Which sounds great until you trim the edges just a hair too small and then nothing lines up anymore.

I ended up gluing up the board and then masking the entire surface before cutting out each black square. To avoid paint seeping under the tape, I shellaced the black squares to seal the edges then applied a few coats of 9+ year old matte black spray paint. I got to use my spray-can gun (also 9+ years old) and boy, does it help. After the paint, I applied a layer of spray-on poly, then waxed the board. I took advantage of the sunniest day so far this year (as measured by my solar panels) to do most of the finish work outside in the sun.

I'm surprised at how well it worked. There are some areas where I used superglue to try and fill some of the cracks with superglue and didn't sand off the staining. I also had a total disaster with the dowels I tried to use for alignment, but I don't want to talk about that.