Chessboard Project: Completed

Wow. It's been a while since I have written anything. Usual excuses apply, of course, plus I really didn't have anything of substance to say. “Oh, yeah, like this blog is usually packed to the rafters with the most trenchant insights ever to grace the Internet,” you say. “You're eloquently mean,” I sob.

Anyway, I finished the chessboard project. All the wood was 100% recovered from past projects or otherwise free. The stains and gloss sealant were likewise potential garage-fire-accomplices I was happy to get rid of.

The finished product is 20” x 20”, and it took me about 6 hours to put together. Lots of sanding. Lots and lots of sanding. Nothing too much else to say that the pictures don't, but here are my “lessons learned”:

• Dollar Store sandpaper is absolutely useless. I don't mean that in a fit of elitist monocle-and-tophat wearing snobbery - it actually disintegrates within seconds of turning on the sander. Go with 3M-made stuff instead.
• Sixty-year-old maple (recovered from a throwaway table found on the roadside) and fairly new cheap cedar boards (leftover from the Windsor II Playset project) turn roughly the same color when hit with a coat of stain. That was pretty unexpected – I kind of figured on a very sharp contrast with little effort on my part. What I ended up with was fine for a generic woodworking project but completely unacceptable to actually play chess on (see top left pic).
• Related to this, I was happy to discover that my hands are steady enough to re-stain the dark squares in place without killing the project. Buoyed by this success, I cockily stained the trim pieces darker as well. Go, me.
• Moths like shiny things, so I should really remember to shut the garage door if I am gloss-sealing something. I was able to mostly dig the partially fossilized morons out of the surface of the board, but I guess the project is technically something like 99.99% vegetable, 0.01% animal, now...
• I cannot wait until I can replace my Craftsman scroll saw with something that doesn't completely suck. I would also like to replace my Craftsman router with something that doesn't completely suck. Oh, they make great hand tools, but my experience has been that the design engineers and marketing folks that greenlighted those shoddy electrified contraptions should be forced to use them for an hour or until something breaks or someone gets seriously injured – whichever comes last.

One last thing: I added a Secret Puzzle to the bottom of this. Since I doubt that anyone (other than my 2-year-old) is going to overturn the chessboard to see what is underneath, I present it here. I will post it on the Secret Puzzle page later. FWIW, I know that the dark squares are actually cedar – I wrote the puzzle before I finished the board. Good Luck!