The project that I decided to work on for my SIDE Project would be the creation of the 3D Chess Board originally played on Star Trek. For creativity purposes, I decided to make it so that it is Harry Potter themed and will seem like a Gryffindor vs Slytherin match, hence the reason why I made the chess pieces gold and green, since those are typically considered Gryffindor and Slytherin colors.

I made this project in my Principles of Engineering class with Ms. Berbawy My inspiration came from a former student of Ms. Berbawy who also created a 3-dimensional chess board from Star Trek. My design is 100% inspired from his project since I based and completed my project based on his instructions, but there are slight differences that exist too. A few of the changes that I made involve using wood for the stand instead of acrylic and the chess pieces that I made are 100% my own. I decided to use wood for the stand since it not only works the same but also looks more similar to the board pieces as well.

Another difference I made is that I changed the color of the chess pieces to make it different from the generic black and white chess pieces, since like I mentioned before, I wanted it to look like a Gryffindor vs Slytherin quidditch match, since I am a huge fan of Harry Potter. The images of both the chess pieces and the final pictures of the overall 3D board could be found in the pictures posted above.

3D Chess is a game that is played differently from regular chess due to the fact that it has "starships," which are represented by the smaller chessboards and can be moved whenever a player feels like it. For more instructions on how to play this game, you can access it on this website. For more information on tournament rules, you can access this website as well.

Supplies

Laser Cutter
3D Printer (PLA or PRUSA Mini)
Some CAD Software (Fusion 360 or Sketchup; preferably Fusion 360)
Approximately 1/8 inch thick wood (10 board pieces overall)
Wood glue (for gluing in the boards together
clamps (keep overnight after you glue pieces together so that it will stick)

The picture above shows some of the supplies that I used for this project, which involve the laser cutter, 1/8 inch thick wood, 3D printer, and the wood glue, which I had to use to make sure that everything stayed together.

The picture on the bottom most right shows one example of how I used the clamps to stick the pieces together after gluing the boards in. I had to use the clamps after I was done wood gluing in order to make sure that the pieces sticking together would be more permanent and won't fall in easily.

Step 1: Designing the Board on Fusion 360

For the 3D Star Trek Chessboard, I decided to make two sets of boards, one of them being 4 by 4 checkered board and the other being a 2 by 2 checkered board.

The design that I made involved measurements of 6in by 6in for the 4 by 4 checkered board and 3in by 3in for the 2 by 2 checkered board.

I further decided to make each of the individual squares on the board 1.5in by 1.5in for the larger chessboard and the smaller chessboard so that they would be the same for both of the chessboards. After I was done with the design, I made sure to make both of the chessboards around 0.118 in thick or 3mm to be exact since that is the wood thickness that I used for both chess pieces, though you can make it up to 5mm thick.

You can then use the appearance tool to make some of the individual squares black to give the two boards a checkered look when designing the board on Fusion 360. For beginners who are new to CAD, tutorials can be accessed at this website.

I will be explaining later how to design the stand on Fusion 360, even though the positions of the board pieces can be seen in the picture to the left.

Step 2: Cutting the Board

I used a laser cutter to cut the board so that it looks like a chess board. At the end of the day, I used the two illustrator designs in order to laser cut three large chessboards and four small chessboards.

I had to search up the laser cut outline stroke length in order to do that one effectively. Laser cut settings could easily be searched up online based on what you need.

Step 3: Designing and Creating the Stand

When deciding to design the stand on Fusion 360, I decided to use the measurements shown in the picture above. The measurements above are all given in inches. It is important to keep in mind that for those working on this project, they can make the measurements any way that they want as long as it fits in with their overall design and is not overly big or overly small, since it would be hard to play chess that way if that were the case.

Step 4: Laser Cutting the Stand Pieces

While laser-cutting the stand pieces, I recalled the original measurements that I took for how thick the board is. When I realized that 1/8in-thick board is too thin to be able to balance the boards adequately, I decided the best thing to do would be to laser cut using multiple pieces of wood the same stand design, and then keep them right next to one another to make the stand thick enough for the boards to balance themselves on.

I would also have to end up laser cutting 12 side pieces using the same 1/8in wood.

I laser-cut three stands and wood glued them together in order to create a stand that was thick enough for the board pieces to go there on top. I also printed out 12 different smaller side pieces so that I would then be able to glue them to the side of the main part of the stand, with three of those pieces being on 4 sides. This would help assure that the stand would actually be able to stand up straight and thus fulfill the function of a stand.

Step 5: Designing and 3D Printing the "Clip" and "Stick"

After designing both the clip and the stick, and doing multiple test prints with the clip since it was not fitting within the chessboard side, I finally managed to design a piece that was good. For the clip, you can make it any proportionyou want as long as it fits into the side of the chessboard and doesn't take up an entire individual board square.

The measurements are up to each individual to decide, and one common thing to do would be to make sure to double check that the inner part fits in well to the side of the chessboard, since that was the mistake that I made that made me repeat over and over again test printing the "clip," even though I got the stick on the first try. This is shown on the picture which is the most to the bottom-right. The "inner part" is the part which is meant to fit into the side of the chessboard, which is shown in the picture that is to the top-right.

Afterwards, the only thing left to do would be to 3D print things out on the PRUSA Mini 3D printer, which is a very simple process. I made sure to 3D print out 4 "sticks" and 4 "clips" for the design in overall.

I used 20% infill when 3D printing out the final designs and 10% infill when 3D printing out the test prints since I didn't want to end up wasting filament.

Step 6: Designing/Printing the Chess Pieces

This is one of the coolest parts about this project, being able to design the chess pieces since they are easy and fun to make! Some things you should keep in mind while designing the project involve:

We are allowed to design the chess pieces in any way that we feel we should as long as it looks good.
Some things I did was make the overall diameter of the bottom circular portion 0.7in and extruded upwards by 0.2in to create the base stand (image to the middle-right).
I also used the offset plane tool a lot as a way to measure lengths and create sketches on top of one another that we could later combine to create the entire chess piece (shown on the image to the top-right).
The image to the left demonstrates all the chess pieces as when I loaded it to be 3D printed out. The image in the top-right is that of the king.
I later used PRUSA PLA to 3D print the chess pieces (bottom 2 pieces).

Step 7: Assembling Everything

While assembling everything I kept the "clips" on the bottom-most and top-most large chessboards and attached the "sticks" to these clips to ensure that they would look good, and it would work out well.

Another thing I did to double check the effectiveness of everything sticking together is to glue a plyboard at the bottom, which gave me the place to decorate with my stickers. Gluing the board to the bottom will make sure that the board will not tip easily and is stable to stand up straight.

Introduction: 3D Chess Board + Pieces