Tube Collectors Chess Set

About 10 years ago I bought a box full of the gold Western Electric 416B

tubes. There were about 30 of them in the box. I ask the guy how much he wanted for the tubes, he said "five bucks", I said "EACH?", he replied "no, $5 for the box". Contrary to my normally wanting to haggle over every price, I just handed him $5.

Since all the way back to when I was first taking Electronics in high school, I had thought about building a chess set using vacuum tubes. I think there was an article way back them about someone building one.

I've seen several since them, most used small 11 pin tubes and such, that just never was what I had in mind.

There was a thread on the Antique Radio Forum recently that go me to thinking about it again, so this afternoon I stopped at Lowes and bought a sheet of 1" thick styrofoam insulation sheet. I figured I could use it to get started with my layout and see how big is was going to be.

Below you can see what I go so far, the entire blue panel is 36"X36",

The chess board is 32" square, with 4"X4" individule squares.

I havn't found everything I need, I'm still looking for something good for Kings and Queens. I'm think about 250THs for the kings, but I don't know.

I hope to have original tube sockets for as many of the tubes as I can fine.

I plan to use a 3" round wooden disk to mount the tube sockets on and these

bases would be painted black and white, as will the squares on the chess board.

I'm not sure what it would take, but I thought about using some of the edge firing LEDs  to light up a sheet of lexan for the surface of the board...

Right now I'm just dreaming.

Here are a couple of more views of the board.

Now I just wish I was a good chess player...

If you have any suggestion, PLEASE let me know.

73, Ron w4ron