Travel Chess Set

A fully 3D printable travel chess set with sliding lid. No supports needed.

Additional materials:

• 96 6x3mm magnets

Dimensions: 200 x 203 x 38.5mm (see images for more info)

Print layer height:

• Box: 0.3mm
• Everything else: 0.2mm

The squares of the board are printed separately from the lid and are clipped in during assembly, so that the entire set can be printed with a single-material extruder.

The squares and chess pieces have slots to insert magnets, so the pieces stay firmly on the board (press-fit, no glue needed). While the magnets are not strictly necessary, the pieces are quite tall for their width, so playing without them could be frustrating due to accidentally knocking pieces over. If you don’t want to use the magnets, you could try printing the pieces with a high infill near the base to give them a lower center of gravity, although I haven’t tried this myself.

I have printed all the parts at 0.2mm layer height with great results. The box can be printed at 0.3mm to reduce printing time. You could probably print all the pieces with 0.3mm or larger layers without any problems, although I haven’t tried that.

The standard version of the board squares have small pegs in each corner to help alignment and prevent rattling. The pegs are probably not necessary, and potentially could cause issues if your printer has trouble printing the matching holes in the board frame, so I’ve included an alternate NoPegs version of the squares.

The board frame is a very tight fit to the lid, and I actually needed to take a hammer to it to get the frame to mesh fully, breaking some clips in the process. Despite this, the frame stays firmly in place. The uploaded model has increased tolerances for the lid clips, but I haven’t tested the new version.