The DIY Chessee Table ♞

When I arrived in Germany for my 6 months ERASMUS program in 2018, I had in mind to begin to feel more comfortable with DIY. I wanted to make a “big” DIY project, involving planing, building, painting… The room I was living in with my girlfriend was lacking a coffee table. We had a big empty space that we wanted to fill. Thus, we decided to construct a coffee table.

This was at the time AlphaGo was getting very famous. AI was being tested on board games such as Go, Chess and shogi. I only knew chess from my childhood, and thought it would be nice to play again, and to try an A.I. to master the game, such as Google-Deepmind had.

We had the 3D printer and had seen beautiful models, freely available on Thingiverse. We just needed a board to play, and the coffee table, thus decided to kill two birds with one stone! 🐦

We first had to create a model the table that we wanted, for two obvious reason :

• agree on how we wanted the table to look like
• having plans that we can show to potential helpers

We wanted to be able to store the chess pieces in the table, in order to avoid losing them.

We decided to use Fusion360 to create a model of the table. Here is the 3D model we made:

Then, we got some rests of wood, and bought the more we needed and started to cut, paint, and mount.
After several hours of work, we had built this:

It was a good foundation