Introduction: Acrylic Vertical Chess Set | 3D Printed and Laser Cut

By Trotec Canada YouTube
About: Trotec Laser Canada provides laser engraving and laser cutting machines for processing a wide variety of materials. Cut, engrave and mark wood, paper, metal, acrylic, leather, stone, plastics and many more. O…

This week we're making an amazing vertical chess set! We've teamed up with Proto3000 to make 3D printed chess pieces while laser cutting the chess board out of our 3mm TroGlass Clear cast acrylic. We've laser engraved our logos. Decorated our board with TroGlass Colour Gloss satin red acrylic and our Trotec Solid Wood Cherry board.

Artwork Files:

- Chess board and title (CorelDraw and Illustrator files)

- Chess board vertical platforms (CorelDraw and Illustrator files)

- 3D chess pieces

Material you'll need (all available on www.engraving-supplies.ca):

- x1 Full Sheet (24"x48") 5mm thick clear acrylic

- x3 Quarter Sheets (12"x24") 3mm thick clear acrylic

- x1 Quarter Sheet (12"x24") 3mm red acrylic

- x1 Cherry Solid Wood Sheet (12"x24")

Machines you'll need:

- Stratasys J750 3D Printer (or any 3D printer)

- Trotec SP500 Laser Cutter and Engraver

Optional:

- x4 1/2" Stainless Steel Stand-offs (to mount onto wall)

Attachments

Step 1: 3D Print Chess Pieces

First, start by 3D printing the chess pieces. You can use any 3D printer, and you'd want to have the largest piece at 2"x2"x3". You can use the colour of your choice for both sets.

Step 2: Engraving the Board

We use the Trotec SP500 (200w) laser cutting and engraving machine to engrave the board and logos. We use 45 power and 100 speed for the engraving.

Step 3: Kiss Cutting the Board

We kiss cut the top header (title) and graphic (wooden chess knight) using 20 power and 3 speed. The reason we kiss cut is that we don't wish to cut through the acrylic, just graze the top layer a bit. This is done so we know the position of our title and graphic in the following steps.

Step 4: Full Cutting the Board

We then make full cuts for the vertical platforms (in the following steps) and cutting out the board itself out of the larger piece of acrylic. We use 100 power and 0.9 speed for the full cut.

Step 5: Cutting the Title

We laser cut the title pieces out of TroGlass Colour Gloss satin red cast acrylic (3mm thick) using our Speedy 360 laser cutter with 100 power and 1.2 speed.

Step 6: Cutting the Wooden Knight

We also use our Speedy 360 laser cutter to cut the wooden knight graphic out of our Cherry Solid Wood (5mm). We used 100 power and 0.8 speed for the cut.

Step 7: Gluing the Title and Graphic

All materials from Trotec have the option of having 3M adhesive backing on the back. We simply remove the backing from the acrylic and wood and glue the pieces onto the main board (where we've made our kiss cut from previous steps).

Step 8: Placing the Horizontal Platforms

We the laser cut our horizontal platforms out of our 3mm TroGlass clear acrylic - we would need 64 pcs in total. We use our Speedy 360 with a power of 100 and 1.2 speed. After mounting the main board on a wall with stand-offs, we then simply insert the platforms into our 64 slots - and place our 3D chess pieces on top of them.