One of my (many) chess sets

A lot of people collect things-- stamps, coins, baseball cards, cars, debts, stocks, socks... you name it, most likely someone, somewhere collects it. I made a decision a long time ago that I would collect chess sets.

Now, I also like building and making things (part of the reason I am an engineer...). So, obviously, it was inevitable that I would make at least one chess set. Browsing the internet, I'd come across a few different "nuts and bolts" chess sets, but they all seemed like they compromised in some way. Usually, there were a few pieces that seemed like quite a stretch interpretively. Or maybe a piece seemed stretched literally; there's a normal sort of height pattern for pieces in relation to one another, and a lot of the hardware piece sets didn't do a good job of following that.

So I set out to make my own, better "nuts and bolts" chess set. As with any good design project, I started out by defining the requirements:

• The chess pieces will conform to standard chess piece height conventions (more on this at the bottom)
• The chess pieces will conform to key chess piece features (it should be obvious what each piece is)
• The chess pieces will be made of unaltered hardware (with the allowable exception of cutting all-thread to length)
• The chess pieces will be disassembly-friendly.
• The chess pieces will use no glues, welding, or solder.
• The two sides will be differentiable without using paint.

The results are below in the picture and slide show.

From hardware set

Turn on the comments for the slide show to see some of the details of making each piece. A list of the parts used is available here.

For the interested: My rant on chess sets

There is a certain order to chess sets which dramatically helps with recognizing pieces and gives a sort of creative framework which I find very appealing. I'm much, much less inclined to play/purchase a set which breaks these 'norms.'

I think one of the most salient features of a good chess set is that the pieces conform to a given height scheme: the pawns should be short and about half the height of the king/queen. The rooks (castles) should be the second shortest. The knights and bishops can be approximately the same height, but if one is taller, it should be the bishop. The king and queen should be approximately the same height, with possibly a top point of a king's crown taller than the queen.

A classic indicator of the king is a cross topping his crown. (I'm particularly proud of the fact that my hardware kings are phillips head screws, and thereby are topped with a cross.... sneaky...).  A classic indicator of the queen is a many-pointed crown.  The only piece which is never radially symmetric is the knight; most of the time the others will be radially symmetric. In the case that a set is actually representing people with faces, this radial symmetry can be neglected in favor of more sculptured people.

 If you want to see the other chess sets in my collection (minus a few recent ones) you can see them here.

From chess pictures