For the 210 final project Natalie and I made 8 white chess pieces out of 1 piece mold.

1. Creating/Printing the 3D print file for the mold

We chose a simple “Pawn” file from Thingiverse to ensure that our pieces would turn out finished despite our limited experience with 3D printing. The file on Thingiverse is called “Seperate pieces from gecgooden Word Chess set” by Glaude. We then followed the steps in the “ENGI 210 Final Chess Project – Fusion 360 Tutorial” google doc to create our .stl file for printing. Except, we skipped the first step that would cut our object in half because we weren’t making a two-piece symmetrical mold so there was no need.

Once our file was saved, we printed our 3.5″ x 2″ mold.

2. Making a Mold out of our Mold to Cast our pieces 

Looking back, we wish we had 3d printed a box/frame to go around our “pawn” object because it would have saved us the headache of searching the OEDK for a suitable frame for our mold. Once we found this cylinder container, we mixed Part A and Part B equally together to create silicone rubber. Our product from this stage is what we used to cast our 8 Pawn pieces.

We used the liquid plastic solution to pour into our silicone mold and then waited 30 min for each piece to dry.

3. Conclusion 

This is my favorite project I made in this class! I like the simple design of just having the word to aid in memory of chess pieces. If I had more time, I’d love to make a whole set to play!

4. Cost Analysis 

Fusion360 subscription = Free (student account)

3D printer (Prusa i3) = $1000

Filament = $1

Silicone Rubber = $5

Liquid Plastic = $5

Labor = 10 hours x 2 workers x $15/hour =$300

Total = $1311