Hinged Chess Board Box by tselling

Last crawled date: 2 years, 12 months ago

This is a chessboard hinged box that I designed myself because I couldn't find anything like it on Thingiverse. The pieces store on the inside of the box and the box opens up to be the chessboard. It is customizable so you can fit it to your print bed. I made it as wide as I could for my Flashforge Dreamer. You print the box twice and then they fit together at the hinge. The STL for the chessboard is 224mm square, making the chessboard squares 28mm square.
In customizer you give the boxLength and the chessboard squares will be 1/8 of the boxLength so you will know what size the chess piece bases should be to fit the squares.
I did the second color with dual extrusion. Combine the second color chessboard2.stl with the chessbox.stl if you have dual extruders. Make sure to line up the STLs by checking the chessboard from the bottom of the model. The center post for the hinge is a piece of filament. I do not recommend scaling the model as then the filament may not fit into the hinge hole, instead change the boxLength and boxHeight in customizer.
The latches were made to hold the outside edges of the chessboard to the same height as the hinge to make the chessboard flat when open. The latches are friction latches so they need to be pretty tight to keep the box closed. If they are too tight to close the box, you can very lightly file the edge of the latch.
To get the STL for just the 2nd color of the chessboard, set onlyChessboardColor2 = 1 in the customizer/scad file. For the chessboard box with chessboard squares in same color set onlyChessboardColor2 = 0.
The chess pieces are from the Alien Life Chess Set: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1575432. The black and gold set was scaled to 70% and the pieces fit the board nicely. The natural white and yellow-greenish set was scaled at 75% and the pieces are slightly large for the board (especially the bases of the king and queen).
I fixed the included STL files with Netfabb Studio Basic... so may need to do the same if you use customizer. Flashprint seemed to fix automatically, but Simplifly3D did not. Be sure to line up the two STLs by looking at the bottom before printing. Centering in the software doesn't work since the box is bigger than the chessboard due to the hinge.
If you do not have dual extruders you may be able to print the second color squares and glue them in but I have not tried this.
I recommend only changing the boxLength and boxHeight unless you have a problem.