Chess Piece Mandrel for Lathe (MT2 taper) by hbutler

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

I'm printing the 4d Staunton Chess Set. I wanted to sand my chess pieces down smooth before painting, so I designed this expanding mandrel to go on my lathe. It fits inside the 3/4" recess in the bottom of the chess pieces and you tighten the nut on the back to make it expand and hold the piece tight. It is an #2 Morse Taper (MT2) and will fit any lathe or drill with an MT2 taper. You need four inches of 1/4"x20tpi threaded rod and a 1/4"x20tpi nut. Epoxy the inner mandrel piece onto the end of the threaded rod. Put the inner mandrel inside the outer mandrel and put the nut on the back. That's it!
One word of caution: Stick with sandpaper and don't use steel wool. I tried to buff with steel wool and it melted and deformed the top of one of my pawns. Look at the last picture for what it looks like. Also, keep your lathe at a low speed, maybe a few hundred RPM max. You probably won't be able to get your pieces on with zero runout and if you crank the lathe up to 3,000 rpm you'll end up with a spinning chess piece flying all over your shop.
One idea if you don't have a lathe: You could cut 1.5" off the back of the outer mandrel and hold the excess threaded rod in a drill chuck to spin the mandrel. It might not have a lot of holding torque, but I'd guess it would be enough for light sanding.
Designed in Autodesk Inventor. I've included the .ipt files as well if you want to have a go at modifying them.