Anatomy of a chess board

Here's how you make a chess board...pictures are more clear than text.

Start with a light wood and a dark wood. Cut 8 strips....4 of each type of wood. Joint and plane to exactly 1/4" thick by 2" wide. The finished board will be 16x16, so allowing for a 1/8" saw blade kerf, the strips should be longer than 17 inches. 18 inches allows for a fudge factor.
My boards will be cherry and poplar...trees from my back yard.


Next glue up 4 pairs of strips...a dark and a light.


Then glue these up into 2 pairs of 4 strips.


The last glue step for now is to join those 2 pairs into an 8 strip plank.



The next part is to cut the plank into 8 strips...rotated 90 degrees. These strips need to be a little wider than 2 inches so they can be "gang planed" to a perfect 2 inches. This is where I messed up before and ran out of material, so you only see 5 strips (there is a 6th one that got left behind on a table). But for the rest of this post, imagine 8 strips.


Take every other strip and turn it around (180 degrees).


Then glue these up in 4 pairs, then 2 groups of 4, then 1 plank...same as above...and you have a chess board.


Those of you with really sharp eyes will see that I am really working on TWO chess boards. When cherry is freshly planed it is more pink. As it sits around it naturally darkens. The top four pictures are with freshly planed wood and the bottom three are the strips that I made a year ago.

Thanks for looking. Hopefully by this weekend I will have 2 chess boards all glued up.