Welcome to my latest chess set!

This is my first complete chess set and an original design - heavily inspired by Wobble Chess (available on Amazon for example, made in Wood). With this set, you will be able to play while the board acts as a trampoline, and the design of the pieces will make them move around.

Below you will find some assembly instructions and warnings / advices, if you want to try this out yourself

How it works and general information/guidelines

For the pieces to wobble, they both need to have a very smooth bottom and a low center of gravity. This is achieved by making the bottom of the piece much heavier than the rest of the object. 

Because the bottom should be as smooth as possible, you'll notice that the layer height is set to 0.08mm. I advise you to not change this.

On the other hand, you will also notice that the pieces come in two parts and that the bottom is printed upside down. This is because, in my tests, the printer just could not handle the curve with the necessary smoothness and supports would make the base too rough. Maybe sanding would help with this, but I did not try it.

This method brings a new problem - because the area of adhesion is lower and the piece will be very heavy on the top, it is prone to peeling off during printing. To mitigate these problems, I printed in very low speeds with a large brim. This worked and these settings are already in the file.

This method did not fully work for the taller pieces, like the king, queen, and bishop. I solved it by adding a support line that would keep the piece in place as, during my tests, the print only failed at the very last layers and having the support around it would prevent it from falling. Maybe adhesive spray would solve this in a more professional manner. The way I did it worked for me, but I have to admit that it is a bit iffy. Either way, all settings that I used are on the provided file.

In order for them to wobble by themselves, an external force to the board needs to be applied. For this, the board is suspended by four rubber elastics attached to the corners by a supporting structure. Once you move a piece, it acts as a trampoline and all pieces wobble like crazy, as you can see in the gif.

Assembly

Pieces

Piece assembly straightforward. You just need to glue the bottom and top of the pieces together. Each piece should fit in place rather intuitively. 

Board 

The board requires a bit more assembly. The board is divided in 4 parts that can be put together intuitively. Because the board is very thin, you need to print the bottom supports and glue them as shown below.

Pay attention that the cylinders should be in the corners. The elastics will be attached here.

The supporting structure is also very intuitive. Below you'll find a picture illustrating it.

And that's it! You'll just need to attach the elastics to the poles and it'll act as a trampoline. They need to be short enough so that the board does not touch the ground.

Final considerations

I used the following colours:

Outside structure - Bronze PLA + Silver PLA

Board: Gold PLA with the ornaments in Bronze PLA

Squares (Circles?) - Black and White PLA

The pieces are hand painted. In the file, you'll find one of each piece, all in white. Of course you need to print the correct number of pieces, and feel free to choose whatever colour you'd like. 

I hope you enjoy this model as much as I enjoy it. Any feedback is very welcome, as usual, and feel free to write in the comments any questions you might have regarding assembly/printing or whatever else.

Have fun!