The graphics haven't been updated in 1500 years, and yet chess is still somehow the best game ever invented. To share my love of the game and that of making things, I proposed to make two public chess tables for the City of Lynchburg. I had originally planned to cast the seat and table bases out of concrete, but my initial prototypes cracked, I iterated, they cracked again, and ultimately went crawling back to trusty steel.

The drawings were made in FreeCAD and bases cut on the CNC plasma cutter. The wooden inlay was designed using F-Engrave and cut on the CNC router. The wooden tops were coated in three layers of epoxy and six layers of halcyon. I had originally intended to cast the chess pieces from epoxy, but as I grossly exceeded the deadline on this project, I decided to buy plastic pieces instead. The tables are anchored to solid concrete blocks, burried 16 inches under ground. Digging those holes through a surprising amount of gravel was the most difficult part of the project and the reason I made my family do most of the work.