Table of Contents

• Overview and disclaimers
• Included parts
  • Inner box
  • Outer box
• Not included parts
  • Chess pieces
  • Chess board
• Assembly
• Bill of materials
• Final thoughts

Overview and disclaimers

This project has been created using Onshape under Free licence, which means commercial use is not allowed.

Project is separated into multiple parts. Boxes are my creation, chess pieces and chess board are available as separate projects on MW. Detailed description of how to combine them is available below.

You don't necessarily need AMS to print this, apart from the crown on top, you can swap colors few times manually of you want.

Project uses few special colors:

• black (regular PLA)
• silk light gold (silk PLA)
• silk bronze (silk PLA)
• marble light (marble PLA)

In addition to filament, if you want some padding in the box, I suggest cutting padded envelope into large squares, see chapter “Outer box” for details. If you don't want padding, I have included separate print profiles for padded (7mm clearance) and non-padded (0.5mm clearance) box.

Included parts

These parts are included in this project as print profiles.

Inner box

Inner box refers to the box that holds chess pieces. You will need two of them, one for each set of pieces. They are divided to maintain footprint printable by A1 mini printer, and also so you can hand over a box to each player with his pieces.

The decorative lines that is visible on sides and inside each slot is simply a full layer color change, so you only need to change color two times. Because of this, you can get away with printing this without AMS, as long as you are fine with not having a crown on top of the box. Or you can add few more manual color changes for the crown as well, but you will need to do this manually after downloading print profile.

Please note that the queen and rook slots are not symetric and as a result, queen and rook need to be put in box in specific orientation. You can feel the angle in the queen slot of box with your finger. Rook has flat bottom, and spike at top, which need to be oriented as shown in image. King is also not symetric, but this one is more obvious. Always check if pieces are oriented correctly before closing box.

There is no locking mechanism, only few guiding pins, so the box holds position well, but it is designed to be stored inside second box to secure it.

Outer box

Outer box refers to the large box, which holds everything together. It has a large opening on top to show the top component. This should be one of the inner boxes with chess pieces, showing crown decoration.

There are two print profiles for this part. One has extra space for padding, the other one does not. I recommend buying regular padded envelope for sending mail, and cutting it into large squares.

I recommend using adhesive to keep the box stuck to print plate during printing, as this is quite tall model.

Not included parts

These parts are not included in this project as print profiles. You will need to download print profiles from other projects.

Chess pieces

You can download chess pieces from Stylized Chess Set by 29FLO project. You will need to download specifically the print profile for this project, link above shoule pre-select it, or just look for the image that looks like images included here.

I have made some minor modifications to the pieces:

• Pieces are resized to fit on this board, pawns are made even smaller to make them stand out as pawns.
• Supports are redrawn to work well with silk PLA. Since silk PLA is brittle but also more stable during print, some supports are not needed at all, others need to be extra strong.
• I added a bit of material to kings crown, it is barely noticable, but the crown broke very easily without it. I am not sure how much it helped, but it is there.
• The knight was very problematic, so I turnedit upside down. This way the face and nose print nicely. It is quite hard to remove the night from supports, use some cutting tool to remove the support without damaging the knight.
• Pawns have strong support that forms a circle, you will also need to carefuly cut the support without damaging the pawn.
• All pieces have 100% infill to give them some weight.

I would like to emphasise that all chess pieces print well with 0.4mm nozzle. This is due to silk PLA, which has a nice property of hiding layer lines. I do not recommend using 0.2mm nozzle with silk PLA as it will easily clog the nozzle. If you are going to use standard PLA or other filament, consider using 0.2mm nozzle to keep high detail.

Last important details is that as you may have noticed, each piece is included only once. I recommend printing them this way. The reason is that while silk PLA hides layer lines, you can also help smooth it out by printing layers faster one after another. Either print by object, or print one piece at a time. Printing multiple pieces at once may result in bad quality or failed print.

Chess board

You can download chess board from Modular Chess Board by EBD Design Studio project. You will need to download specifically the linked print profile, which is for A1 mini, because it is the right size.

I have made only one important change when printing this, that is changing surface patterns to achieve more metalic visual effect.

The bottom of board is printed using marble PLA and tiles are printed using the same silk PLA as chess pieces. I printed the tiles in batches of four so I can print them by object. Printing only one object at a time has an advantage of hiding layer lines and it helps preventing warping as layers are printed faster.

Assembly

1. place first layer of padding at the bottom
2. put four chess board parts at the bottom, with all tiles in place
3. place second layer of padding on top of chess board parts
4. place one of the boxes with chess pieces
5. place last layer of padding
6. place second box with chess pieces, you may need to push down a bit to squeeze the padding
7. place the lid from the side, make sure that the first padding isn't stuck between box and lid

Bill of materials

Please note that these are just approximations, actual amount depends on generated supports and number of failed attempts. :)

Final thoughts

It took a while to put this together, but I am happy with the result. Even when the box is relatively heavy and unusually cube shaped, the chess set is very unique and worth the trouble.

I would like to thank 29FLO for creating such beautiful chess pieces, and EBD Design Studio for creating equally beautiful ches board.