Chess Piece Container
For Christmas we recieved a nice set of resin cast chess pieces of cats and dogs. The pieces themselves are pretty sturdy but would accumulate damage if simply tossed into a drawer, it would be nice to have a case to protect them. The following containers function as cases for the cats and dogs chess pieces and can be combined together to form a makeshift chessboard.
The chess pieces were packaged with plastic tray that was formed to tightly secure the pieces inside cardboard box. The box here can also act as a chessboard with the checkerboard pattern it displays, hence influencing me to adopt a similar functional design with my print. The issue occurs once the game is finished when attempting to place the pieces back their respective slots as there is no clear indicator for where each piece should go.
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Cat Chess Piece Container
The case for the cat pieces was designed to provide slots for each individual piece with varying height to allow cover to fit properly. Both the bottom and top portions of the case utilize debossing to provide general information and indicators for each specific piece. The case is primarily meant for light stationary use as the separate portions are held together with magnets.
For the bottom portion of this case, slots for the cat pieces were extruded into the body for each specific piece type in order to keep the pieces at a consistent height. Each of the cat pieces have a consistent square base of around 33.50 mm in width and a slot width of 35 mm was used to accomidate variances. An initial slot was sketched out and with the rectangular pattern tool, the remaining 15 slots were created. This method was also used on the outside of the case to create the 4 x 4 checkerboard in order for this print to be utilized as a corner in the chessboard.
Each piece type varies in height ranging from 20 mm for a pawn to 40 mm for the king. To accommodate this, the slots for each piece type were extruded accordingly to keep the tops of each pieces at the same height. In order to indicate where each piece should go, the svg icons above were debossed into the each of their respective slots.
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This took around two and a half days and used approximately 300 grams of PLA filament. This print and the following prints were configured to use 0.12 mm extruder width and 10% infil with support for necessary areas.
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In order to keep the top and bottom portions of the case secured to each other holes were cut into the corners of each print to hold magnets in place. The magnets here come from an old Geomag toy used to create 3D shapes but have recently fallen out of use. Instead of discarding these, I repurposed them to be used in this case as they still function as slim, yet strong magnets.
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The top portion of this case was a bit more simple as it utilizes the same rectangular pattern from the previous print to create the checkerboard pattern, however in this case it is on the top. The holes for the magnets (~27 mm in height, 7.30 mm in diameter) were kept the same and also utilized on these corners as well. This print utilizes debossing heavily as the front, back, and inside of the cover has text applied to it.
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The text from information card included with the chess pieces along with credit to the designer was debossed on to the exterior and interior of the print. This removed some material but added significant time to the print and data to the .stl and .gcode files. In anycase, the printer was able to handle this extra work and resorting to the smallest available extruder width helped with capturing the details of small text.
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Dog Chess Piece Container
The case for the dog chess pieces copies a lot of the design features of the cats chess piece container. The only change in this case was to accommodate the circular base of the dog chess pieces as opposed to the square cat chess pieces. For this the same process utilizing rectangular pattern tool was repeated and the depth of each slot was customize for its intended piece.
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After around 3 days of printing and 300+ grams of filament, the bottom portion of the case housing the dog chess pieces finished printing. The pieces fit well in their respective slots which had an average diameter of 33 mm, although some pieces needed a little bit more force to be put in place due to some pieces having more of an oval base.
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The top cover of the dog chess pieces case is pretty much identical to that of the cats chess piece case where the only difference is in the content of the debossed text. As such, the print time was relatively the same as the other cover print with the same amount of filament.
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The difficult part of finalizing each print was removing the support around some of the debossed text while minimizing the damage done to the print. Fortunately, the smaller text does not utilize support but the text for the Dog and Cat labels utilized a small amount of support contributed to print scratches when trying to remove them. In the future I will probably spend more time in the slicer to indicate areas on the print that should not have printed support.
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The prints were finally assembled with the last step being to insert the magnets into their given slots. The magnets help keep the top and bottom portions of the print in place in case configuration but also aided in securing the corners when in the chessboard configuration. In the end this project was a success as it fulfilled the need for keeping custom chess safe while the additional functionality of utilizing the container provided an added bonus.