Making a chessboard pt 4

More chessboard progress. I spent most of my time since the last post fixing mistakes. They do seem to compound on a project like this.

Here's the board after a sanding on its plywood sheet.


This picture shows that I can't take pictures. Anyway, this shows the profile of the border. The groove will fit over the lip made by the plywood giving a lot of gluing area. The groove was made from multiple passes on the tablesaw. It's rough but it will be hidden. The accent strip has been attached but is still untrimmed. In the spirit of being a cheeseball, I've since run the borders through the planer to make the accent strip flush on both edges. :-D


I'll tell on myself a little here. Due to some error propagation, the playing area needed to be trimmed - the squares weren't perfectly aligned. But I did it poorly causing the border to fit badly at best. There was a 1/16" gap between the accent strip and the board. It doesn't sound like much but it looked like a chasm. Completely unacceptable. I filled the gap in with some scrap and planed the edge reasonably straight. As you can see, the worst of the damage is fixed. I still have some finagling to do but it will be minor.



This close-up shows how it all comes together. Obviously I still have to miter the border. The accent strip is Brazilian Cherry. Which isn't related to cherry at all. Hopefully it will stay this color! There are some gaps between the accent and the board that will disappear with sanding and finagling.


And finally, here's sort of what it will look like. Pretend the corners are mitered. The ends of the borders are a little rough. Not to worry, I'll be cutting an inch or so off when they are mitered.


I'm not too sure about the oak border. Maybe I'll use cherry on the next one.