Wednesday, December 5, 2007

64 Great Chess Games - Board Numbers 10-18

Series Title: 64 Great Chess Games (Chess Boards)

Background:

Boards 4-9 are all done with glue and clamps and just need to be sanded and finished. Any board I make, whether cribbage or Chess always looks a bit "rough" until it gets cleaned up. Once a board goes through it's inital clean-up sanding, it starts to reveal what it's going to really look like, and to me, this is the most exciting part of the whole process. I seem to be getting some traction selling Chess boards on Ebay, so I will try and sell boards #4-9 (6 chess boards) on Ebay before the conclusion of the 2007 Holiday Season. Cribbage board sales have been slow to non-existent this Holiday Season despite advertising on Google AdWords, Yahoo, and actually getting the meta-tags right on my WebSite, which in turns allows the WebCrawlers to correctly index my web site.

As mentioned previously, starting with Board #10, the boards will Chess Tournament Legal, with the squares measuring around 2 1/4".

Coming up, boards 10-18 will lay out something like this:

10-12: Hard Maple/IPE for the squares
13-15: Hard Maple/PurpleHeart for the squares - with Paduak inlay around each Square.
16-18: Hard Maple/Walnut for the squares - with Purpleheart inlay around each Square.

Board #3 in this series had some Purpleheart Inlay around the squares, but only on 2 sides. I would like to try the inlay around all 4 sides of the square.

I still have no idea what to charge for a chessboard. Ebay at least helps me get a feel for what is a fair price since I start the auctions at a very reasonable price and let the buyer determine the final price.

Some of the chess boards are turning out pretty heavy. Especially those with Ipe in them. One board weighed in at around 8.5 pounds. The lighter Chess boards weigh in around 3-4 pounds.

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