This Kansas City woodworker is carving a chess set inspired by his hometown skyline

All the iconic buildings — from Liberty Memorial to Sky Stations and 909 Walnut — are taking shape in miniature under a scroll saw in his Northland garage.
Woodworking has been a hobby for David Pentimone since his parents bought him a used scroll saw off of Craigslist for his 12th birthday.

His first projects were simple.

“It just started with like some simple jigsaw puzzle, just like a silhouette of a penguin or a deer or something like that,” Pentimone says. “And then I started getting a little bit more adventurous."

Armed with designs he found in a book about making wooden chess sets, Pentimone began making pieces. Eventually he made a complete set. Next came a chess set inspired by Roman architecture.

These days, Pentimone has been carving custom architectural chess sets with his scroll saw — a new DeWalt, though he's had several different ones over the years — modeling them after skylines in San Francisco and New York. The hobbyist's latest set features hometown architectural icons like the Power and Light Building, Bartle Hall and Liberty Memorial.