Where can I get a nice chess board?

I have wooden chess set currently, but I am thinking about purchasing another, can you recommend any good stores that sell fair- priced chess sets? 

Thank you. 

The usual suspects:

Wholesale Chess

Chess House

The Chess Store

Not an exhaustive list but a good start.

ChessUSA

ChessBazaar

House of Staunton

American Chess Equipment (plastic)

Chess Cafe

Do not overlook the wood woorkers on Etsy.  I bought a solid wood 2 1/2" AP & Maple with a Walnut Border for $125.00. It is almost 1" thick no veneer not a printed board.  I do believe this is one item you can get cheaper as well as having solid wood made right here in teh USA customized to your specs. You want a 2.4" or any size just ask one of these craftsmen for a quote.  I took only 1 week led time for my board and then 2 days shipped USPS PRIORITY.  I won't recommend anyone woodworker over another as I do not want to be accused of spamming.

I found at least 4 craftsmen to work with on Etsy all giving me resonable quotes. Some of the other woods I got quoted were a bit higher. They all have their work shown on their individual Etsy stores. Etsy if you did not know about it is a web site with no bidding and all products either have to be hand made or so many years old to list them. 

Do you have a picture of your board?

Nice find, wiscmike.  The Etsy guys seem a cut above your usual Ebay custom makers.  You can never have too many boards...

Hi Max, I never took a pic of it. I believe the woodworker took a pic of it and posted it to his Etsy site after it was finished. I found the site and I hope no one thinks I am spamming.l It's the board marked $135 and I beleive he would give you a discount on top of that if you ask. I had him raise the board a bit from the frame. It was kind of experimental as I plan to have another made. I would not get that big a border again, maybe 1" (1/2" each with the 2 different woods that the board is made of) instead of 2" and I would get the board raised a bit more.  Remember this is solid wood and nice wood to boot. 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/BnVShop?ref=pr_faveshops

Thanks for the link. His prices are good. I love solid-block boards. I have one of the last Drueke solid-block boards (2" squares) made before Carrom pulled the plug on them about 5 years ago. It is perfect for my favorite set of chess pieces, but I have some other sets of pieces which require larger squares (e.g., 2.5" squares). I'll keep that seller in mind.

Wow, I did not expect to get this many replies! Thanks for the advice everyone! 

Recently I came across a ebay seller who is offering hardwood chessboards between 100-120$ and extra if you want some special wood or designs. He is from Michigan just like Drueke. For chess boards, US seems to be the best option. All I have is one chessboard - a Drueke but might buy one more in next few months.

http://www.ebay.com/usr/bonzott

Not a bad idea to setup a thread where you list all US chess board artisans and reviews.

Also wanted some information if there is anyone who specializes in restoring Antique Drueke chess boards just Alan Dewey restores chess sets ?

Before buying a solid-block board from a private maker (rather than a known brand like an original Drueke), you should ask some questions. I've never cut a Drueke apart, but I've read that they used internal joinery between each square and between the squares and the border, rather than merely gluing everything together. They also made sure that all of the grain in every piece of wood they used ran in the same direction. This made things more difficult for them on the border (i.e., two of the border edges had to be made from small pieces of wood joined together, which is more difficult than just using a long strip of wood but having the grain run perpendicular to the grain in the rest of the board), but they had a good reason for it, i.e., it allows for uniform expansion and contraction, whereas with grain running in different directions, you have different pieces of wood fighting each other during expansion and contraction.

As for the internal joinery (probably splines or tongue and groove), normally they aren't necessary when gluing boards edge-to-edge (such as when making a tabletop from e.g. 6" wide boards), because the glue bonds stronger than wood, so if it ever breaks, it won't be along a glue line; the wood itself would have to break. However, when gluing 64 blocks of wood together, half of them will inherently involve gluing endgrain (weak) rather than strictly gluing sidegrain like in a normal tabletop (strong), so internal joinery is a good idea, and I suspect a lot of these boards from private makers are merely glued together despite the endgrain problem.

The only way to avoid the gluing endgrain problem in the first place is to glue blocks together with all of the endgrain facing up, which is how it is normally done when making thick butcher blocks (AKA: endgrain butcher blocks). Chessboard are rarely, if ever, made this way. It is hard to get a nice finish on endgrain (which is why the tops of rooks tend to look not as well-finished as the rest of the rook), and even if you do, endgrain simply doesn't have much eye appeal compared to top or side grain. It is fine for a butcher block, but it doesn't really have a "fine furniture" appearance. Plus you'd have to get some 2.25" x 2.25" (or whatever square size you want) turning blanks, which tend to be more expensive than e.g., 4/4 lumber for the same volume, and it is harder to work with (you can't or shouldn't cut a slice off a 2.25" x 2.25" turning blank in one pass on a typical table saw for example).

I don't think anybody would build a chessboard out of 64 individual squares. This is how I understand it is done: Making a Chess Board the Quick&Easy Way: http://youtu.be/RUKPs7lrucQ

Yes, using 64 individual squares has been done, probably more often than the easier method in the video you linked to, simply due to a lot of people being unaware of that method. But whether you try to use 64 individual squares, or you use 8 strips glued together, turned 90 degrees, cut into 8 more strips and glued together again, the problem remains the same, i.e., if you have the top grain facing up (which is the case with nearly all wooden chessboards), half of the internal joints will inherently, inescapably be endgrain-to-endgrain, which is very weak. A 2.25" square cut from a 3/4" thick board will have side grain on two of its sides and endgrain on its other two sides. In a checker pattern, all 4 sides end up being joined, which means that two of those sides (half) are endgrain-to-endgrain joints.

With the gluing strips together method, the first step results in very strong sidegrain-to-sidegrain joints. If you stopped there, there would be no issue. When you turn that striped board 90 degrees and cut 8 more strips, that is 100% endgrain you're exposing with each cut, and when you glue them all together, they are all endgrain-to-endgrain joints, with the result being half of your internal joints are strong, and half of them are weak.

You can think of wood as being composed of a tight bundle of straws; the straws representing the grain. Gluing along the sides/top of those straws is fine, as there is plenty of surface area for the glue to bond with. However, what if you try to glue the end of the bundle of straws to the end of another bundle of straws? There is hardly any actual surface area there; it is mostly open air.

In this image, the yellow lines are between the weak endgrain-to-endgrain joints, and the blue lines are between the strong sidegrain-to-sidegrain joints. This is absolutely inherent when the topgrain is facing up (as in nearly all chessboards), no matter what method you used to arrange them for gluing:

MaximRecoil,

Thank you for your instructive post.

I keep asking this question but never get a reply. Every week, there are Vintage drueke boards turning up on ebay, sometimes not in great condition.

Is it possible for a good artisan to restore it back to its mint condition ?

I have made 3 solid wood Chess boards.  And this endgrain talk is not significant to the making or strength of the board, from experience.  And yes, I made 2 of the boards with a master woodworker so we did do this correctly.

We also did make an extra strip of wood squares and then staggered the strips on all the boards.    Because of this none of the wood was ever turned 90 degrees.  This worked best.

OF course we did plane and join all the wood before dimensionally cutting and  glueing and clamping.  After 13 years, none of the boards have even begun to think of warping.

Back to this endgrain concern the ends of the boards are endgrains and the rest is where the majority of the glueing occurs.

It would be relatively easy to restore a Drueke solid block board to mint condition, though you will lose a little thickness of the board in the process (how much you lose depends on how damaged the board is). This is fine, because at about 3/4" thick, the board has a good deal of thickness to spare.

The easiest way to do it would be to find someone with a large planer. Run it through the planer to remove all the damage, then hand sand, up to say 220 grit, apply a sealer to all sides, and then a few coats of varnish or polyurethane (you'd want matte, or semi-gloss at the most, in order to approximate the original finish).

If the damage isn't very deep to begin with, you don't need to plane it, just sand it. Start with something like 80 grit to remove the damage, then progress through finer grit sandpaper up to e.g., 220 grit. If you've never sanded wood before, start with this article:

http://www.popularwoodworking.com/techniques/rules_for_sanding_wood

This is one of the advantages of solid-block boards compared to veneer boards, i.e., they can be refinished many times.

That's simply false. Endgrain-to-endgrain glue joints are inherently the weakest type of glue joint; that's a fact; not debatable. Now, endgrain-to-endgrain glue joints may be strong enough for the purposes of a chessboard, but regardless of that, they are certainly weaker than sidegrain and topgrain glue joints.

We also did make an extra strip of wood squares and then staggered the strips on all the boards.    Because of this none of the wood was ever turned 90 degrees.  This worked best.

The "turning 90 degrees" refers to the second set of cuts relative to the first. If you cut 8 strips of wood and glue them together, you have to turn the resulting striped-pattern board 90 degrees when you then cut it into more 8 strips, else you will simply be cutting it back into the original 8 strips along the glue lines. It is impossible to make squares without having cuts which were made 90 degrees relative to each other.

And your staggering method did nothing to avoid the endgrain gluing issue, because it is impossible to avoid if the topgrain is facing up. All it did was keep all of the resulting squares of wood showing the same side, just as when they were part the original boards you started with. This might be important for aesthetic reasons (i.e., if one side of one or both of the boards you started with looked significantly different than the other side), but it has nothing to do with the endgrain gluing issue. If both of your boards that you start with look pretty much the same on both sides, then it is a waste of wood to do the staggering method as opposed to the flipping-every-other-strip method.

The only way to avoid the endgrain gluing issue is to have the endgrain of every square facing up (like in typical butcher blocks), in which case, all of the glue joints will be on side/top grain by default. You can't do this with typical lumber such as 4/4 (~1" thick after rough cutting, ~13/16" after planing) unless you laminate a few boards together to get a board which is as thick as the size squares you want to make (e.g., 2.25"). Doing this would result in visible seams running through each square on your completed chessboard though. For seamless, endgrain-facing-up squares (like a butcher block) you'd have to start with e.g., 2.25" x 2.25" boards (usually referred to as "turning blanks", or "table leg blanks"). You would glue 8 of those turning blanks together, which would all be sidegrain-to-sidegrain joints, and then turn the resulting striped board 90 degrees and cut it into eight ~3/4" slices. Lay them flat and glue them all together, and those would all be sidegrain-to-sidegrain joints too, resulting in a very strong chessboard (every bit as strong as an unaltered 18" x 18" x 3/4" board straight from the sawmill). However, most people wouldn't consider it as aesthetically pleasing as a topgrain-facing-up chessboard.

Back to this endgrain concern the ends of the boards are endgrains and the rest is where the majority of the glueing occurs.

Half the gluing inherently occurs on endgrain in a topgrain-facing-up checker pattern. There is no way around it. See the image I posted above.

Maybe this is old news, but Bill Drueke, grandson of the legend, has made a batch of 23" Drueke Walnut/Maple chessboards selling for $300.

If the quality is the same, it sounds like a good deal. In 1970 I believe my family and I chipped in to buy my grandfather one of the original boards for $125 -- a fair amount of money in those days.

http://www.chessusa.com/product/chess-boards-225inch/DB-103.html