Being overquoted doesn’t make it any less true — I also love it when a plan comes together. Sure, victory over entropy is always temporary, but it’s still just really satisfying to bring diverse ingredients together into a whole that solves a problem or creates something new in the world.
As an aside, this is the reason I have such little patience for people who turn their noses up at “boring” enterprise problems and only want to work on whatever shiny new thing the media is excited about. Every problem is fun when you treat it an opportunity to smack down the second law of thermodynamics.
Anyways, these days many of my “opportunities” come in the woodshop; I just finished one that has brought together a ton of different techniques / steps into a result I’m pretty proud of. Just a quick post — let’s see how this pebble + driftwood + epoxy + Glowforge + LED chess board came together!
1-2. Pebbles and Driftwood Grid
A walk on the beach at Whidbey inspired this project. We don’t have a bunch of shells or glass, but we do have a ton of cool rocks — on this day the contrast between bright white quartz and dark black basalt caught my attention and basically screamed out “chess board!” So I planted my behind down in a gravel patch and started collecting pebbles in a bucket.
The idea was to create a grid using interlocking driftwood strips, then fill the strips with pebbles and lock it all in place with epoxy resin. I had a bunch of offcuts left over after milling/gluing driftwood fir blanks for a neighbor (they became really cool mancala boards!) that were perfect. Setting up table saw jigs for repeated cuts like this is great therapy (and this painters tape hack does a great job of keeping strips from getting sucked down under the blade).
3. Epoxy Fill
I love working with epoxy resin, but I hate polishing it. In order to make the board glass-clear top and bottom without that chore, I started with a sheet of clear acrylic and super-glued the grid on top of that. After filling the squares with pebbles I filled them to the top with EcoPoxy Flowcast. This is a nice resin for “deep” pours because it off-gasses less than other products, and doesn’t get quite as hot while curing.
However, Flowcast doesn’t “self-level” nearly as well as more traditional epoxy — the surface ends up just a bit “bumpy” which messes up the gloss. So once the squares were largely full, I turned to TotalBoat TableTop to finish it up. I used blue tape along the bottom edges of the acrylic to protect that surface from underdrips. Which worked, although removing it cleanly was a bit of a chore.
4-5. The Base and Lights
The point of using clear epoxy here was to allow light to pass through the board; just sitting on the table would ruin the effect. After trying a few different ideas, I landed on a simple Glowforge box (thanks again boxes.py) made of white oak painted with black acrylic. The board itself sits on a few braces on the inside so it sticks out about 3/8” or so above the top edge. Easy peasy!
I had some LED strip lighting left over from another project — this stuff is amazing, just snip it to the length you need, mix in 12 volts of power, and you’re off to the races. It even has adhesive backing, so I was able to stick it along the inside of the box pointing inwards. A little hole in the side for a power switch and a bit of soldering to attach a battery pack finished the job.
Almost! It turned out that with the black interior of the box, the light didn’t distribute very well — it was super-bright at the edges but not towards the middle. Not to worry — Lara found some neat adhesive mirror vinyl sheeting that bounces the light around beautifully. NOW it’s finished!
… Almost! I mean, it’s all working and awesome and that’s cool. But I realized that, especially because the board fits pretty snugly into the box, it’d be more convenient to use a power supply vs. a battery that will need to be replaced and likely get corroded after sitting too long. Amazon sells everything, so a barrel socket and power supply are jetting their way to me as I write. No project is ever really done.
And of course, a chess board without pieces isn’t much of a set. Maybe something with my new 3D printer will be the answer here. That plan will also come together — eventually!