eBay

knight_knight_zzz · ‎04-22-2010

Purpose of this thread: To bring to the attention of fellow collectors, chess sets which appear to be fairly (or very) reasonable priced. Of course, "fairly (or very) reasonable priced" may be subject to some debate. (And of course, such sets are those in which we, ourselves, are not all that interested to buy.). 😉 Contributors to this thread realize that it is ok for all of the amicable / amiable members of this group to help each other find potential sets which may well elicit interest in purchase. This thread is not restricted to antiques sets or ivory sets or "low end" sets or "high end" sets. "All sets are welcome"! Let's start with: 130385155763. (Possibly Sandalwood? Tusks could well be bone. Size of chess pieces not identified. BIN and "best offer" is available! Appears to be original display/storage box. Probably made in India?) GO FOR IT! ;-) John. VT.

knight_knight_zzz · ‎02-18-2013

The delays in response to both you (Ty) and Clay are, hopefully understandable.... since I have been pretty busy with gorging myself with Chinese New Years food (as well as celebrating?) "President's Day" here in the USA. But enough gorging for the moment...

Clay, I do like that modern duplicate of the man ray set. I will take your word that it looks better in person than on the advertisement. Question is: Do I want to pay "that much" for it?

On the other hand, (Ty), I suspect that the asking price of that plastic (transformer-like, non-ebay) chess set is close to ground level. When clicking onto the link, I don't see the asking price - though the shipping does not appear unreasonable. Mind me asking how much you paid for it - and if you have received it by now, what you think of it "in person"?

The plastic transformer-like set reminds me of "Puzzle Chess Sets", and (as you and others may know) I have a liking for such sets.

John. P.S. Speaking of Transformer toys, quite a few years ago (when my children were in college) I was cleaning up and organizing the old basement "playroom" where my children had kept most of their toys when they were young. In order to make more room, I discarded (threw away) the original boxes in which the transformers were kept. When my son found out, he kinda raised holy hell (in his tactful way). Needless to say, he was dismayed.... and I learned a good lesson. (Don't throw away the original box if you are interested in potential long-term monetary re-sale value...)

ne0romantic · ‎02-18-2013

John,

Oh, yes. It didn't even occur to me posting on the "good buys" thread that with the Etsy item sold the price would no longer be displayed on the page. I think I paid like $27 for the chess bots... that might have actually been the set plus shipping... or maybe before shipping... Anyway it was under $30 and it was not a particularly memorable amount. The seller says he's working on another (new design) set and that more chessbots should be available soon.

The set did arrive... so far on the one hand it is pretty awesome.

On the other hand if it hadn't been so cheap I'd be angry about a few things which are apparently limitations of the makerbot not being the greatest 3D printer in the world. There are imperfections in some of the lines of extruded plastic causing some very weird bumps to be all over the pieces in random places, also the material is not very strong and two pieces have broken already. I super-glued them and they are now stronger than they were to begin with. The breaks are invisible as the entire set is basically made from a million stacked layers of plastic "glued" together to begin with. The layers "break" apart along the seams so the breaks which were there to begin to with don't show, or at least the ones that have come apart and been glued back together don't show any more than the ones that haven't. All of them show. If you look very closely at the pieces you can see they're made of thin layers stacked up. It probably sounds worse than it is from my description.

I photographed the set and will update my site with it soon. I'll put a link here when I do and you can see how some of the pieces look up close... aside from that the "feel" of the set is similarly cheap. The pieces have hardly any weight to them at all. The design is spectacular but something might be said for downloading it from the "thing verse" and printing it on a better 3D printer than a makerbot for a higher quality set... of course that would be more expensive and the joints are made to pop together and apart... they might not work as well if the material were a different strength than this plastic that didn't have the same amount of give. I think better 3D printing will become affordable in my lifetime (if not some of yours 😛 ) though. We'll see.

Ty

ne0romantic · ‎02-18-2013

What the heck? Here's a rough draft of the page:

http://www.tykroll.com/chess/chessbot.html

I still need to write a blurb about the set and some of the captions need work and/or might have spelling errors so it's not linked to the rest of the site yet... In the meantime you can see what I mean about the random rough texture up close.

Also I ordered two "hero" bots. The "monster" bot does look interesting and now I kind of regret not checking it out since two of the same is less interesting but I wasn't "feeling it" at the time when I ordered and I do like being able to interchange parts in the robots as I did in a couple of the pictures.

I'll clean up the page and also make a page about my Cmielow set probably later this week or on the weekend.

knight_knight_zzz · ‎02-18-2013

Ty.

BRAVO...!

That story and pictures and creativity about the ChessBot Set was SPECTACULAR.

(Kasparov, as well as Deep Blue, would both be feeling blue with jealousy about your chess and word and image-creating, playing ability...!)

Absolutely Fantastic.

(Now, my first hope is that my support of your endeavor does not kill any interest in/for others to also take a peek at your link. My second hope is that I live long enough - at my ripe old age - to see much more of such displayed genius by you! You certainly have a rare form of left and right brain thinking...!)

John. :^O Loved it. Loved it Loved it...!

lichess · ‎02-19-2013

Ty, An echo to John's comments. Fascinating and spectacular.Floyd

ne0romantic · ‎02-23-2013

Thanks, you two. Well I've cleaned up the page a bit, made it "live" along with a Cmielow Porcelain set, and now to get back on topic it appears Joe Larson has 4 more for sale. At $25 I do think this is a good buy: http://www.etsy.com/listing/109657227/robo-action-chessbot-toy-chess-set-hero I may check out the monsterbot eventually too. It's pretty weird having different shapes as well as colors in a non-figural set but the gorilla thing does seem pretty cool.

knight_knight_zzz · ‎02-24-2013

Ty,

Thanks for the update on the autobot chess set; it is good to see that there are a few more available. I would like to buy one of them from the maker / seller (I seem to have a real weakness for puzzle-like related chess sets,) but I don't really want to go through that website, since it appears that one needs to do the purchase via a credit card, etc.

I have spent some time trying to find a phone number and/or email address for the seller, but I have not been successful. I do have his actual address, and I could write to him, but I think that time is of essence here. Might you have either his phone # or email address? (You can email me the info; I believe you have my email address. OR you can post the info right here if need be.)

(I want to pay by USPS Money Order. And yes, I know that is still the old fashion way to make purchases; the less that the internet has as far as credit card info, the better. Some folks might smirk at my personal degree of apparent paranoia, but let them. If/when their personal info is eventually stolen, they might be just willing to admit that I was more right than wrong....)

In return for your help, I can send you some snow. (Clay / Noybear) sent some my way yesterday and last night. I am just trying to extend and promote the generosity...! 😉

Thanks! About to be Snowed-in, Cabin Fever John

ne0romantic · ‎02-24-2013

I don't have his email. I looked around some of his websites and it is weird he doesn't seem to have it up anywhere. He's on google+ but I haven't tried that yet myself. I was using the Etsy contact stuff to chat about the purchase with him. I'm not sure how they are about that, if you can go from using the "contact" button this page http://www.etsy.com/listing/109657227/robo-action-chessbot-toy-chess-set-hero to doing email and a transaction outside of Etsy. I know eBay has devices in place to try to keep people from doing that. It doesn't seem so much Etsy's style at all. That'd be the way I would go. You probably have to make an Etsy account which is annoying if you're not going to use it.

Looking around his other sites I did find a form to contact him on some kind of programing thing he's doing with C++ stuff http://cymonsgames.com/contact-us/ ... it appears it would go to him but it'd be misusing the form and might annoy him that way. It'd be better to start with the Etsy page if you can.

If you can't get in contact from that I can try to ask him for information for you but I'll just be using the Etsy contact stuff I pointed you at first.