A segmented-construction wooden coffee table with an inlaid chessboard playing surface, built as a personal woodworking project.
Chessboard coffee table during shop finishing: two inlaid playing surfaces set into a large hardwood top, with contrasting square colors and a broad surrounding field.
A personal woodworking project: a coffee table with a chessboard inlaid into the top, built using segmented construction with contrasting hardwoods.
This is a portfolio piece for the segmented-woodworking technique — the same family of methods used for segmented woodturning, scaled up to a flat-panel furniture surface. The chessboard inlay required precise dimensional control across 64 squares of two contrasting woods, with clean transitions between squares and consistent grain orientation.
Related repositories: woodworking for the broader shop context, and ashiko-drum-workshop for a very different segmented-construction problem built around stave geometry instead of flat-panel inlay.
- Build photos
- Wood selection and dimensional notes
- Segment-glue-up sequence
- Finishing schedule
(Forthcoming.)
Mid-build, September 2015: hand-planing the assembled chessboard panel flat with a No. 5 jack plane. After 64 segmented squares are glued up, the surface has minute height variations at every seam — hand-planing across the panel is the only reliable way to bring it to a single plane without sanding through the thin contrast veneers.
The chessboard square geometry, while visually simple, is dimensionally demanding:
- 8 × 8 = 64 squares with two-color alternation
- Cumulative dimensional error is the enemy: by square 8, a 0.5mm-per-square error has compounded to 4mm of misalignment
- Wood movement in two contrasting species at different humidities is not always the same; the substrate has to absorb that
- Grain orientation affects both visual quality and long-term stability
This is the kind of project that sounds simple until you build one.
Released under CC-BY 4.0 — personal project, free to reuse and adapt with credit.
| Section | Status |
|---|---|
| Repo description, license, gitignore | ✓ done |
| Hero photo | ✓ done |
| Fabrication handoff scaffold | ✓ scaffold only — see build-notes/fabrication-handoff.md |
| Build narrative | forthcoming |
| Wood selection notes | forthcoming |
| Segment dimensions | forthcoming |
| Finishing schedule | forthcoming |
CAD archive is not shop-ready. The
cad/tree carries rich 2015 SolidWorks parts and drawings, but they have not been re-reviewed for current fabrication. Treat them as historical reference until each gate inbuild-notes/fabrication-handoff.mdis signed off by a shop reviewer.