When we see a supreme luxury set of chess pieces it’s often difficult to imagine just how much work has gone into producing it. There are many stages that the producer has to go through in order to end up with 32 perfect chess pieces that are good enough to attract the ‘luxury’ price tag.

Simple beginnings

A chess piece usually starts life as a solid block of hardwood that is cut roughly into an eight sided shape. It’s then put into a lathe and turned to it’s correct shape by pushing a very sharp blade against it. The blade is of utmost importance. It must be a perfect reverse of the desired shape and extremely sharp. The aim is to cut into the spinning wood without splintering the wood or leaving small hollows. Not something an amature can achieve very easily! The end result should be a perfectly formed chess piece albeit with a slightly rough surface.

Smoothing things over

The next job is to carefully sand the rough surface of the chess piece away. This is usually done with very fine abrasive paper. Then the piece is polished with a rotating buffer to remove the sanding marks. There are many stages to the sanding and polishing of a chess piece. Mechanical polishing combined with hard wax is used to create the desired effect.

A weight off your mind

Even the best style and quality of chessmen would be nothing without some weight inside them. The chess piece is clamped carefully and then a large hole drilled into the base. The hole is then filled with either molten lead or a steel disc. It’s vital that some room is left in the hole for some flexible filler. If the metal weight goes in with a tight fit it can cause cracking later on!

Covering things up

The base is then covered with either a felt circle or a piece of leather to cover up the weight and filler. After this a final stage of polishing takes place. It’s worth noting that during all of these processes each piece must be carefully checked. Defective or damaged pieces must be thrown out and replaced with a new one. On luxury chess sets it’s typical to turn around double the quantity you need in the knowledge that 50% wont make it through to the end of the finishing process without picking some damage of defect. Super luxury chess sets will often have minute tolerances of what can be considered acceptable, which can mean the pile of rejects is huge compared to the finished examples.

Ebony Chessmen

The classic look that chess players and enthusiasts love is the deep black of ebony wood for the dark chess pieces. When polished to a deep shine it looks so deep, so black, so Staunton! But Ebony is seldom this black by nature. It will often have streaks of dark brown running through it. It is common practice to stain the ebony jet black in order to create a uniform blackness.

The global economic crisis is not exactly hot news at present. One of the biggest problems facing us in the UK is the decimation of our currency. The GB pound is not so much suffering but dead in the water at present. It seems every time Gordon Brown or one of his Socialist cronies open their mouths in public the value falls even further.

What has this got to do with chess sets you might ask? Well the Chess market in the UK relies on goods imported from other parts of the world. India, China, Poland, Italy. Irrespective of which country the sets come from the prices are going up!

It’s a tough time for chess retailers. Often accused of making huge margins by those with no business understanding. The reality at present is that margins are getting tighter, sales harder to come by and suppliers are seeking to sell their wares to other countries who’s currency is remaining strong.

Will this mean the end for some of the smaller chess retailers? or even the larger ones? Only time will tell but one thing is for certain… it doesn’t get much worse than this!

It can be a very sad sight, you have a stunning set of wooden chess pieces that were bought long enough ago for the warranty to have expired and in one of the pieces a huge crack is developing. This problem can affect sets from both sides of the price spectrum.

Anyone who knows about wood will tell you that wood will move and change shape over time. When it’s first harvested it is full of moisture, as it seasons this moisture decreases. During this process the wood can shrink, warp or move.

The idea behind wood working is to let the wood complete all of it’s moving and changing before you turn it into your desired object. There are however a few problems. Firstly there are two factors which affect the wood. They are temperature and moisture and the two go hand in hand. Heat the wood to a high temperature and you can expect to see moisture reduce, let the wood sit in cooler damp climes and expect to see the moisture increase.

Because most chess sets are made in one country, then shipped to another it can experience dramatic changes in temperature and humidity. Another factor involved is the weighting of the chess piece. Chess pieces are hollowed out at the base and metal weights inserted. In the old days they used to drill a hole, fill it with molten lead then seal up the base with a leather disc. Worries about the safety of lead caused a switch over to steel which was inserted in the form of solid discs.

In the beginning this caused a problem. The old lead method was quite ideal for the pieces because lead was soft, this meant that the wood could move, bend, and contract slightly and the soft lead inside would accommodate it. Hard steel however was less forgiving and if fitted too tightly inside the chess piece would mean that cracking was very likely.

This problem was solved by drilling a slightly larger hole in the piece than was actually needed so that the steel disc fitted loosely inside. A soft ply-able filler is then inserted around the steel to fill in the gaps and remove any gaps or movement. This meant that the wooden chess piece could move, bend and grow without the weight inside causing the wood to crack.

Despite these developments some cracking will still occur, wood is not a 100% stable material and a degree of change is to be expected in it’s lifetime. When buying fine chess pieces from a retailer ensure you choose one who offers a good replacement policy for any pieces that do crack. Just make sure you don’t start cracking up yourself if one or two of your pieces do.