Week 2 Make Five Things

Final Result

Idea

My initial idea for making multiples of something is to make furniture, more specifically stackable shelves, that could be placed in my apartment as a decorative side table. To get more inspiration, I googled around and this product made by B-Line company just caught my eyes. I love this shelf module combining vivid shapes with a high degree of flexibility and functionality, so I decide to duplicate this module with woods.

Sketch and Calculation

I download the datasheet of this Quby shelving module as a reference. The dimension of this shelf is 18” x18” x 14” (46cm x 46cm x 36cm). I searched around lumbers on the HomeDepot website, and found that if I stuck with this dimension, I might be over budget. After some calculations and lumbers that I could get from HomeDepot, I shrank the scale down to 12” x 12” x 10”.

To make sure that stackable shelves of this size can work functionally as a side table, I user-tested with a package box and an armchair.

The original product is made with a module that can melt through the center of cubic lumber, but I don’t think this is a possible approach for me to make the cubic shelf. So my first version of the design is to buy some pieces of wood with 2” thickness and 12” width.

I planned to cut diagonally on the side (wxh) to make a quite wide wedge as the outer frame. To obtain the curve, I planned to buy some 2” x 2” x 8′ lumbers. Drilling them with a drill press and sand them with a sanding machine to retouch the smoothness. The last but not the least thing to do is to joint these pieces together.

After completed all the design and sketches, I ordered all the lumber online and prepared to pick up them in-store the next day. But I didn’t receive any notifications from the store that my order was ready to pick up, so instead of waiting for a who-knows-when notification, I decided to go to the store in person to get all my wanted materials.

Buy lumbers

Till I stood in the middle of the lumber section, did I realize that I was too naive to bring those lumbers home. I wasn’t even able to move the lumber out from its aisle. PLAN CHANGED! I started to brainstorm alternative plans that I could do.

Make Cuts

I followed my design to draw reference lines on the lumber for cutting. I also put marks on each piece for later assembling.

When I tried to use saw machines to cut my lumbers, I encountered a big problem that neither of these machines is able to cut through my lumbers in a quick and sharp cut. Miter saw is not flexible enough but its cut is straight, band saw is quite unstable but is able to cut all the way through.

I started with a band saw but immediately found out that I was not able to hold and move my large piece stably and straightly. I made this skewed line at the first cut, which forced me to turn to the miter saw for cutting. I cut my board from both sides with a miter saw and got these two sharp but not connected incisions. In that case, I used the band saw to completed the cuttings finally, even though the cut is not perfectly straight but I could touch it up with sanding machine later.

After cutting all the pieces out, I smoothed all edges and adjusted the straightness of thm with sand machines. One thing to mention here was that the sand machine was a true eating machine, which easily decreases the length of these pieces. I measured the dimension of these cut pieces and none of them was of the dimension that I designed on paper.

When I worked on my second large piece of lumber and tried to cut it up into small pieces, thanks to tips from Skyler, I found out that the miter saw has degree of freedom in moving forward and backward. This made my cutting quite easier. Even though it still could not cut through the whole piece at once but with a quick cut on the other side, I obtained a much straighter cut.

Jointing

I do love Mortise-Tenon Connection, which connects wood piece without any glue or metal, I decided to use these tiny dowel pins as my “glue” to joint pieces together.

I use this block to drill holes on the side of the woods. No measurement required.

Insert all wood dowel pins and connected all pieces, my very first cubic shelf frame finally finished. This was quite harder than I imagined.

Jigs

To make it more convenient to drill holes on the face front side of the wood pieces without measure millions times, I tried to made a jig for assistance.

Duplication

I made some slips when duplicated for another four frames. I drilled too deep which left a hole on the outer side of the wood. The material of this lumber is also quite breakable, which I should pay attention to for lumber selection. I also had a nightmare of this sand machine which ate up quite a huge part from one of my frame pieces, so I had to cut another piece.

Waxing & painting

I hope to paint the shelves and wax them as a retouch but due to the limited time, I might need more time to finish this procedure.

Some thoughts

Although what I finally made was not exactly the same as what I planned initially but thanks for this experience, I learned a lot of how to operate different machines and also some tips of using them.