Checkmate: The Final Move in My Senior Project
Cason t -
Hello everyone, and welcome to the final blog post on this project!
Since the last post, the board has been completed along with the pieces. To finish the board, I needed to cut deeper into the pins of the dovetails. After lining the interior board with the frame, I made marks to indicate how far I needed to cut. From there, it was just a matter of caution to avoid mistakes. Having come this far, a mistake was the last thing I wanted, but thankfully, everything went smoothly. Seeing the frame fit the checkered board felt great—it truly started coming together.
At that point, all that remained was gluing. A simple task on the surface, but in practice, it was slow and methodical. I took it day by day—quite literally. One day, I glued one side, clamped it, cleaned any excess glue, and left it to dry. Then I repeated the process for the next few days. And just like that, the board was done.
With the board complete, the final pieces remained: a queen, a king, four bishops, and four knights. First came the queen, followed by the bishops, then the king, and finally the knights. To my surprise, the piece I thought would be the hardest turned out to be the easiest to make. I had been expecting tons of trouble with the knights—issues in forming the piece or keeping everything intact—but none of that happened.
All I did was roll out a large piece of clay and cut out the shape of a knight. Once I had one, I had all four, as I could simply trace the shape to make the others. The hardest part wasn’t the physical crafting but deciding on their design. After some deliberation, I chose to keep them simple to ensure consistency across all four knights. Surprisingly, this section of clay-making was the smoothest part yet. With references in hand and the design finalized, the knights turned out to be an unexpected time saver. The biggest challenge since the last post? Cleaning up after working with clay!
Now that everything is complete, the only thing left to do is show you what it looks like all together. But instead of me showing you, why not see it for yourself at the senior project presentations on Saturday, May 17th? You’ll get a condensed version of everything I did, and maybe even play a quick game of chess.
Thank you all for tuning into these weekly blog posts and supporting me on this journey of creation. I hope to see you on the 17th! But if I don’t, thank you for your time.
Goodbye!
Comments:
All viewpoints are welcome but profane, threatening, disrespectful, or harassing comments will not be tolerated and are subject to moderation up to, and including, full deletion.