Chavet set?

You have the real deal . Congrats  !!!

Fantastic! The 55mm squares are ideal for this set as well. I picked up another one last week - the best example I have ever seen. No cracks or leans, smells new, still with the original polish on. You can never have too many of these imho.  It did have the bulging weights though so I had to reweigh and refelt it. Obviously there must have been a flaw in Chavet’s weighting system/glueing at the time.

Another (almost) $3000 chess set  .  Congrats !!

No this one was not the 3k Chavet boxed set but a new one that like BeyondDuplication’s came in a no name box. The seller had a couple for sale so I snagged what he thought was the best/newest one.

Lovely, Audioq!  How did you manage to reweight it?  Did you remove the old weights and put in new?  Or did you just file down the existing weight until it was even and then apply the new felt?  Any advice you can give me would be appreciated.  You did a great job.  Looks fantastic!

I removed the old weights and put in new ones from the spares I had. I refelted with thin felt I had found a while ago which is almost identical to the felt Chavet used. I used Boehm wad punches to cut the felt to the right size. Just a hair less than the base of the piece. Getting the old weights and cement out is a pain 😬and the weights are normally ruined in the process so you need replacements handy.

No wonder it looks so good!  That's a pretty major amount of work.  I'll have to have a long think about what to do.  I don't have any spare weights...or a wad punch...or thin felt.  Did you use some kind of chemical to free the weights from the wood?  I thought about taping around the weight and using a dremel to sand down the exposed bulging lead.

I used cyanoacrylate (superglue) debonder to try to free them up a bit. Still need to pry them out though so they end up a mess. Take a look at Chessspy’s (Alan Dewey’s) website to see how he makes replacement weights for Jaques sets so you could potentially use the old weights and recast them to the right shape again. I don’t like to mess around with lead so I just used the spares and binned the ones I removed.

Sanding down the weights could also work well as long as they don’t protrude too much.

Congrats with this beautiful, well preserved set.

As you can see, the beautiful prominent proboscis is not duplicated very well. 

Look at the last picture and the shadow the vintage Chavet casts! 

From the pictures I’ve seen of the Chess Bazaar knights, they don’t look very good either.

Both the Staunton Castle and the Chess Bazaar Knights remind me of ugly, sawed off noses, typical of German Knights.

What’s sad is, I know of several cases, where people have asked very talented Indian manufacturers, to make them a good Chavet reproduction, but for some reason they never get it right.

Maybe the small group of collectors here, that already own vintage Chavets, should just shut up and watch vintage prices continue to rise.

Sorry I took so long to post!