Folding Chess Board

How cool is this? -- A compact, folding chessboard that can be printed on virtually any printer and assembled from parts.

Joinery - shapes used to connect parts to create an assembly - is an important skill every 3D designer should master. This chessboard uses two simple yet important joinery shapes, the slider/slot, and the bubble joint. Sliders and slots are used to construct the two halves of the board. The hinge joining the two halves is constructed using FlexMesh bubble joints.

Most of the individual pieces are smaller than 1" or so, though there are also sets of 30mm, 35mm, and 40mm alternative cubes that you can print to create a larger board. Though the pieces fit snuggly, the necessary tolerances aren't obsessive. So parts are easily sliced and can be printed in either PLA or ABS on most any 3D printer, even those with small build volumes.

Follow the Inventor Studios Tinkercad tutorial to see how the parts of this chessboard are designed. The two parts of this tutorial consist of the Tinkercad design, followed by a demonstration of how to assemble the board from printed parts. Follow the entire tutorial collection to refine your modeling skills.

Come on, it's your move.

Instructions

Parts shown in the pictures can be printed using PLA, PETG, or ABS. Some parts were printed using low-cost filaments, which resulted in some imperfections in the top layers of the print. But I'm sure all would agree that the visible sides of the board are still very presentable.

There are 6 different shapes that come together in the assembly of the board. The corner pieces have 2 sides with slots. The edge pieces have 3 slots. The center pieces have 4 slots. The hinge pieces have 3 slots and a FleshMesh bubble joint. A slider is a connector used to join pieces via their slots. A FlexMesh sub connector joins the hinge's bubble joints. The following shows the number of each type of board piece needed of each color for a chessboard...

Corner -- 4

Edge -- 12

Center -- 12

Hinge -- 4

Want to create a slightly larger board? Then print the pieces having names that begin with '30mm' instead.

The color of connector pieces is less important because they're less visible than are the core board pieces. The total number of connector pieces needed are as follows...

Slider -- 92

Sub -- 4

The biggest printing challenge is the need to reduce "flaring" that occurs in the outermost thread of the first few layers of a print. Flaring is caused by hot filament oozing out beyond bounds of the object being printed. (A closeup showing flaring is included in this Thing.) Flaring is most easily reduced by carefully calibrating bed/nozzle clearance or simply sanding off the extra material from the sides of printed parts. If your assembled board bows up toward the center, then flaring is the likely cause.