Big Chess Set

thingiverse

I wanted to print some large chess sets for my two oldest boys who are in their 30's for X-mas last year, so I looked at every set and every piece that was available from Thingiverse and a few other places. It was my intent to scale whatever set I decided on so that the largest pieces would have 56mm bases to fill the squares on a standard 2' X 2' vinyl chess mat. I think themed chess sets look amazing, but for me, don't play well. My dad bought me a Star Trek TNG chess set years ago. It would never fail that I'd forget which pieces represented bishops and knights during play, subsequently costing me games, so I steer clear of the themed sets. My go to set uses Staunton pieces which makes it very easy to play, but scaling those designs to the sizes I wanted makes them look "not so good". I'm not especially artistic, however, you needn't be an artist to model simple shapes. The one piece I stood no chance of designing by hand of course was the knight. Of all the pieces and sets I looked at, the set by JayCoob had the most fantastic looking knight. While his whole set looks great, I thought the pieces were just a bit too ornate for my tastes, so I remixed his knight only to simplify the base which I'd use for the remainder of the set. The end result, IMO, is a decent looking set that prints relatively easily. JayCoob's knight requires support material. Without breaking it into multiple parts that would require gluing, there just isn't an easy way to print a good looking knight. To keep support material off the base of the piece, I sliced it using "tree mode" and for placement "touching build plate". Additionally, I wasn't pleased with how the overhangs came out on the kings cross when I printed it the first time so I separated the cross so that it could be printed flat and then glued into place atop the piece. None of the pieces aside from the knight require supports. For both colors, I printed each of the 2 knights individually, just because it's the most likely to be problematic. I sliced the king and queen to print together, 2 copies each for the rook and bishop to print together, then 8 copies of the pawn to print all at once. I'm pleased with the end results of this chess set and my kids seem quite happy with them as well. NOTE: JayCoob's original Chess Set is at: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2966092 Thingiverse is broken again and won't allow me to add the link through the "Remix Source Files" option.