My father brought this home when I was a child. At some point it ended up in my apartment. My brother thought it had been lost, but his eyes lit up when he saw it.
I’m on a mission to reproduce this set for my brother’s birthday.
I’ve completed the first step – identifying all of the fasteners used. Now I have to figure out where to source them. Hopefully I won’t have to buy a gross of black phosphate acorn nuts when I only need one.
So I didn’t make the birthday deadline, but I did make it in time for Christmas. Also, I couldn’t find any black phosphate hardware in an appropriate size, so black epoxy spray paint will have to do.
I got everything at Home Depot and Lowes, though I had to wait for both of them to restock before I could finish the set.
The king and queen are 3/8″ hardware. everything else is 5/16″.
All the bases are flange nuts.
| Piece | Q | Parts (add a flange nut to each one) |
| Pawn | 16 | 1 1/2″ bolt |
| Rook | 4 | 2 1/2″ Socket head screw (originally castle nuts) |
| Knight | 4 | 2″ threaded rod, wing nut |
| Bishop | 4 | 2″ thumb screw |
| Queen | 2 | Acorn nut, external tooth washer, nut, 3″ threaded rod |
| King | 2 | lock nut w/ external tooth washer, external tooth washer, 3″ threaded rod |
I applied red thread lock to the nuts. Probably a bit of overkill, but over the years, the blue on the original set has lost its grip on some of the pieces.
*Back story on the original set, after conferring with my mother & brother. My dad was working for a fastener distributor in Wilmington DE in the mid eighties. The chess set was made as Christmas gifts for the sales reps to give to their clients. I’m not sure how my dad, the accountant, managed to snag one, but he did. There were more made, but we don’t have any idea how many. Given the technology of the time, I imagine all the other sets were distributed in the Wilmington-Philly-South Jersey area. I also wouldn’t be surprised to learn that another hardware company had a similar idea.
Modern Anachronist 