Furniture Plans - Step by Step from Inspiration to Reality - Part 5 of 8

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Practicality

Most of us don’t like spending more on a piece of furniture than we need to.  So the key to utilizing the materials at hand is what I call practicality.  This is where your concept was refined by theory, and now your design is modified through practicality.  This is where your inner engineer comes out.

The key to using all of your material is very practical.  Ant the key to this is to continue to refine your design to use all the material.  Most furniture plans out there have a good idea of how to do this, but since you most likely don’t design furniture for a hobby, I’ll let you know some of my secrets to making this work.

Most of the furniture plans on Plan Canvas are built using 3/4″ thick plywood.  Most plywood comes in sheets of 4′ by 8′, or 48″ by 96″.  Also note that some of the plywood available has dings in the edges, or is not cut perfectly to the “4×8″, being a half inch too short.  The importance of all of this is that when you’re laying out the parts to cut on the plywood, the part cannot be longer than say 95″ or wider than 47″.  This gives us just a little room to make up for a bad piece of wood.

One little note here.  I’m not a big fan of MDF for furniture making, specifically if the furniture will be used outside, or if you’re building a table where it will continuously see condensation.  The reason here is that MDF is Medium Density Fiberboard.  Fibers are taken, compressed, injected with glue, heated, and finished.  This is a great use of material that would otherwise be thrown away, but it is not as strong as plywood, nor is it as able to withstand long exposure to the elements.  Plywood, on the other hand, is made up of sheets of wood.  The grains are alternating, which means that it is very strong in all directions.  It can be harder to finish though; it depends on what grade of plywood you purchase.  I’ll try to do a special posting on materials, as they are incredibly important in the design.  I’m also very open to comments here, so please feel free to add them!!

OK, so now on to the bigger steps.  For the furniture plan for Chair 00004, I had drawn out a basic design of the chair in TurboCAD.  I also made some measurements.  What I found was that all the parts for the chair could be laid out on a half a sheet of 4×8 plywood.  This is huge!!  Two of these modern chairs can be built from one piece of plywood!  The downside was that there was some wasted wood.  There will always be wasted wood (well, almost always).  The key is to make as little waste as possible.

Now there are two methods here.  The 21st century method of using CAD software, or the inexpensive method of using paper cutouts of what you’re building.

An example of what I did in TurboCAD is below.  I sketched out the design in CAD, then moved the parts around on a 4×4′ shape.  I moved them until they were both easy to cut, and easy to measure out.  Below is Chair 00004 in its final layout on plywood:

An example of what you can do on paper is also easy, it just takes more time.  Draw out your pieces on a piece of paper (do this to scale, so 1/8″ on your cutouts is equal to 1″ in real life) and cut them out.  Then on another piece of paper, draw out a square to represent the plywood, and start moving your cutouts around until they fit the plywood box most efficiently. 

No matter which way you do it, what you may find is that there needs to be some changes to the sizes of your pieces to make them fit right.  So make the changes in size, redraw your design with the new sizes, and see if it works.  If it doesn’t work well at all, use more wood.  I hate this alternative, because it goes against building modern furniture for cheap, but it does allow your design to be built as you want it.

Try and try again.  This part can take some time, since you’re continuously going back and forth between your design, the theory, and the material at hand.

Once you’ve laid them out to where you feel comfortable, and are using the amount of materials you want, then its off to the next stage - rough draft.