Travel Chess- Reduce, Reuse: Checkmate

Hello, today we are going to teach you how to make a chess/checkerboard for your backpack! We took wood material from an old cabinet that was going to be thrown away and used it for the assembly of our project. With a few easy steps, you will be able to get your game on! After making our portable chess board, you will never need any other games! Our project is fun to make and fun to play with.

• Wood (use any wood with a thickness of around 1/4'')
• Wood Glue
• Paint
• Laser Cutter
• Table Saw

Below I have attached all of the files that you are going to need to use. These are all in pdf form so you can use any file converter on the internet to convert them to whatever you need to be compatible with your machine. I recommend using convertio. You are going to need to make sure that you have two copies of the chess pieces and the chess piece bases so that you enough for each color. After you have used your laser to cut and engrave the pieces, the bases, and the chess board you can proceed onto step 2.

Take one set of pieces and one set of bases and paint both sides. Take the remaining set and paint it a contrasting color. We used silver and black. Once the paint has dried, you can pop out all of the pieces and put the the bottom of the chess pieces into the base then glue them into place. One you have done this with every piece, you are ready to move on to step 3.

First, the designated components (stripes of laser-cut plywood) of the walls were glued together, keeping 1/4in gap between the thinner top stripe and the thicker middle stripe; as seen above. Then, the bottom edges and sides of the walls were glued together around the base square piece, creating a box The top chess board is able to slide in and out of the box, allowing for the chess pieces to be stored inside the box.

The piece that you lasered with the text on it will be used to lock the top in place during travel. Once you slide in the playing surface, slide the the locking piece so that the extra pieces on the edge fit into the grooves from the sides. If they do not fit at first, then you can file the grooves down to the proper size. Congrats you have built your own travel size chess board!