Focus: Rendering and CNC Lathe Turning
The goal of this project was to design and build a full chess set: each piece and the board. This was a three-week team exercise as part of Penn’s IPD 5010 course. We started by brainstorming possible designs. The design we converged on followed a simplified, minimalistic version of the classic chess piece design. We decided to play with the materials to create a more interesting, weighted feel to the pieces.
The top parts would be made of clear and black acrylic, while the bases would be brass and steel, respectively. Going into SolidWorks, we made small tweaks and changes to the proportions of the pieces and settled on the designs pictured below.
Below are some of the KeyShot renders I made for this set
Moving to Mastercam, we created the code to machine these parts on a CNC Lathe, Haas TL-1. All of the chess pieces are either fully or nearly fully radially symmetric (with the exception of the knight), so a lathe would be able to form most of their features. [insert images of Mastercam]. Since these parts would be machines on a CNC lathe, there was little work for us to do apart from loading the material and setting the machine to work. The one big exception, as you can see in the CAD was the knight. It still had a round base that had to be machined on a lathe. However, the body of the chess piece was designed to be machined on a mill. Much of my work was done on the knight, so this is the part I will focus on.
The picture above on the left is the final CAD for the knight piece. The exploded view in the center shows how the acrylic piece and the brass base interface. The picture above on the right shows an intermediate model of the manufacturing process. The first operation was done on a CNC lathe (Haas TL-1). This is the profile that the TL-1 turned from round stock. From this part, it was placed into a collet and put into a CNC mill (Haas MiniMill). It was then milled into the final knight shape seen in the middle picture above.
These four screen captures of the Mastercam show the machining process used to create the knights, from the lathe to the mill.
This video shows the MiniMill taking first passes on the part in its second operation after the lathe. It is being machined out of aluminum as a test before committing to the acrylic, of which we had limited stock.
These are how the parts came out of the mill. Something I thought was interesting was the surface finish on each part. The lathe left a frosted, matte finish on the parts while the mill created a glossy surface that was transparent in the clear acrylic. These parts were finished by being put back into the lathe and parted off to leave a small pin on the end to mate with the brass bases. The bases were machined on manual lathes. All of the other parts were machined on the TL-1 CNC lathe and attached to their respective bases.
The final result of our custom designed and manufactured chess set was photographed and the pictures are below!
