Expensive Chess sets

 Thanks, mattDearle.  It's been a long road to get to that point in music as well as chess collection, but I'm very happy to use it all nearly every day.  I can't say that I haven't lose time and money buying, selling, or trading, but eventually I got something I really wanted.

chess the game of kings , played by kings , These,s old chess set back then

Was always expensive , 

History in your hands , craftmanship ,

That  has always come at a price ,

We just have more choice , NOW ,

It looks nice, but I would worry about the King's crown. I think it would break more easily than most.

Hehe! That's the problem with the very expensive sets (by whatever your own definition is). The more you pay, the more risk there is of losing a lot of value in one careless moment. That's why even if I could afford a $10,000 set, I wouldn't buy it. Leave those to the museums and get something that's nice but replaceable without great pain.

The worst part is if a piece is dropped on a board.  The piece is usually okay, but the board will get be dented if the wood is soft to begin with. 

WELL YOU GOT TO TREAT THEM LIKE A LADY .,,,,,

What soft woods have you seen used in boards?

Would you say oak was a little soft? It's not a wood I would choose for a board (I've seen red oak offerings by custom makers) but does that count?

FWIW, my nicely seasoned Eastern Black Walnut board will certainly dent if a piece is dropped from high enough. 1/2" thick blocks too not veneers.

There is a cure for dents though. Takes a little water, some wet paper towels, and a soldering iron. So they say...haven't tried it yet.

Yes,North American Walnut is quite soft.

On the other hand, Ipe or 'Brazilian Walnut' is one of the hardest woods of all.

This stuff is measured on what is called the 'Janka Hardness Scale'. 

I see ebony is ranked very high as well. I've seen one or two lovely ebony (true black ebony) boards but they are expensive and somewhat impractical. For pieces they are excellent and I love mine--5 years and no cracking so far. Just purrrrty.

What soft woods have you seen used in boards?

As the others have said, walnut is sort of soft. So is mahogany (often very similar in many ways.) Drueke uses aspen, which isn't exactly hard. Some of the maples can be pretty soft as well, though sugar maple is pretty tough stuff.

There is a cure for dents though. Takes a little water, some wet paper towels, and a soldering iron. So they say...haven't tried it yet.

Hot distilled water and a small, clean artist's brush. Try to confine the application of the water to just the dent. (If the finish is thick and/or unbroken, the water will do nothing. It needs to soak into the wood to swell the compressed cells.) Allow to dry thoroughly, naturally. Don't attempt to speed the drying. May be repeated. If, after drying, any grain is raised above the surface, try burnishing down with something like the back of your fingernail and light pressure. Be careful not to scratch it with the edge. Test your techniques on the back of the board first, if possible.

I see ebony is ranked very high as well. I've seen one or two lovely ebony (true black ebony) boards but they are expensive and somewhat impractical. For pieces they are excellent and I love mine--5 years and no cracking so far. Just purrrrty.

Ebony is usually pretty hard, but the resource has been squandered. You will see some marginal ebony on occasion -- open grained, lots of brown, and almost ... chewy. I don't like ebony on boards, as the dark pieces, especially ebony pieces, tend to get lost on darker boards. It's my preferred wood on a nice set, though it has gotten expensive. I do like my nice dark rosewood sets almost as much. It's not a big step down. Sheesham you can keep, but I agree with another poster in that it could make for an excellent beater set.

As I said before, if ebony is properly dried and aged before use, it is NOT any more prone to cracking than other woods. It's commonly used for the fingerboards and sometimes other fittings of violins, violas, cellos, and basses, and rarely if ever cracks in those applications. Barring abuse or physical stress, wood only cracks through differential shrinkage. If properly dried, the shrinkage is virtually complete, and it becomes remarkably stable. In chess pieces, there can be an additional "time bomb" if the wood wasn't properly dried. The metal weight won't shrink, but if the wood around it does ....

Of course, a rapid change in ambient humidity can cause almost any wood to crack, but if the humidity in your home is pretty stable, most old wood will be very happy, ebony included.

For me, it was curly maple that got a small dent, and I may have a tiny spot on some Honduran rosewood.  My boards are heavily sealed to prevent warping, so the trick used with the water and hot iron won't work and I would not risk ruining the finish to fix the dent.  I guess it's like a battle scar.  Eventually, it's going to happen no matter how careful you are.  BTW, the hot iron and water trick works great for table tennis blades!

Any thoughts about board materials other than wood? I did a search for marble boards, but the few I found were smaller than regulation size. (Not that regulations are relevant for games at home, but once I got used to tournament sized pieces and boards, it's hard to go back to smaller sets.)

 I think wood has the best look and sound.  I have a marble set (I think it's marble, anyway), but it's much smaller and the pieces lack detail. 

 Some time ago HOS put out some standard sized granite boards. They were testing for durability and ended up throwing stuff at the board, unable to make a scratch.

The issue with such boards, apart from their weight, is that when pieces get knocked around and dropped it's the pieces that break more readily than if it were a wooden board.  The fine parts of the queen's crenulations, the king's crown, the little ball atop the bishop's mitre, you get the idea. Nicer and more delicate sets suffer first.

I think they offered metal pieces in Collector style with that board. Not my cup of tea really.

I have a small (1.5") leather board in green and natural that is great to play on. I wish I had one made for me in 2-1/2" for my good sets. The hangup with them is that leather will wear before wood will, and if you get liquid on them you risk spotting the finish. You can leave the surface unfinished of course but the green would be fading over the course of time, maybe very slowly if not left in direct light.

Leather is great though.

Have you seen this site? http://www.katherinelouise.biz/

She makes some some nice looking leather boards. I stumbled onto it last winter and thought it was good enough to bookmark.

 She made my custom leather board!

I asked for precise work (being finicky about chess boards) and she delivered as promised.

It looks like she is back up and running. Looking at the prices they seem "upgraded."

I still want a custom 2-1/2" sometime from her.

Based on the work she did for me, I heartily recommend her.

Cool, I thought her work looked pretty good.

The leather/leatherette boards got me to thinking about my vinyl board. It's certainly not a luxury item -- very cheap in fact. But it and the weighted plastic pieces I use are leaps and bounds above the folding cardboard and the hollow, unweighted plastic pieces I used as a kid. Do Toys 'R Us and Walmart stock decent low-end sets? It's amazing what you can get for US$10-20 online compared to the crap (still?) sold in the big name retail stores.

I agree totally. Wooden chess sets look so much better. I currently have my eye on a set which costs around £300.... one day....one day.