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Rough Draft

Even if you’re doing a one-off piece of furniture, or making a small set, it is very good practice to put your drawing and method of assembly on paper.  The reasons are pretty basic:

1)  If you’re ever going to build another one, lots of little intricacies may be detailed here.
2)  If you’re going to share the plans, others need to know the details on how to make it.
3)  MOST IMPORTANT - Writing down the furniture plan makes sure that you’ve thought through the whole process of building your project.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve just gone off to build something without thinking it through all the way.  This creates expensive waste - so take the time to think it through.

For furniture plans, its best to start from the beginning - the materials.  Make sure that the materials you’re choosing are available, that they are the right sizes, and that they are actually what you think they are (in other words, get your hands on some real stuff before you buy it!)

The next step in the process is to write down the list of materials.  How many fasteners do you need?  How much wood, paper, glue, metal, paint, stain, tools do you need?

Then, make sure your cut diagram (from the last post), makes sense for what you’re building.  If the cut diagram isn’t right, you’ll create more waste.

Now make sure that you can actually cut it!  For example, if you have some interior cuts (like the arms of Chair 00004), you’ll need not only a jig saw, but also a drill.  If there are beveled edges, make sure you have a circular saw or table saw that can cut at angles.

The next step involves your imagination.  You have all the pieces in front of you, now put them together.  Think about how you can get them together so that they are at the angles you need (like the chair legs to the seat), and that you can assemble them (the legs on the diagonal storage table are a good example - you cant put the bottom shelf in last because the legs are already attached to the table top and can’t bow out to accept the dowels from the bottom shelf).  This is a very important step and can really change your designs if you don’t think it through!!

Finally, think of what you would want to do to finish your project.  Does it make sense to sand all sides of each piece?  Can you save time by sanding only a couple of surfaces?  Should you paint all the pieces before putting them together?  Do you need to protect some of your surfaces from damage during assembly (since wood glue soaks into the grain, stain doesn’t come out uniform where glue has soaked in - tape off areas that glue may touch to keep your finish clean).

So to sum up, the main reason for putting the furniture plan down on paper is to make sure that you’ve mentally walked through each step of making the project happen AND to catch anything you may have missed so far.  Spending time here can help save a lot of time, frustration, and money when you actually start making sawdust fly!


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.

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Prototypes

This next step can be a breeze, but make sure that you’ve spent due time on the last step - theory.

The reason why the theory part is so important is simple - waste.  If the theory behind your design isn’t quite complete or thought through, you may end up building something that really won’t be of any use.  Now this does not mean that the prototype will have an aura of greatness about it - its a prototype!  It will be ugly, multicolored, unfinished, snarly, and it will also prove to you that your theory is good and areas that need improvement.  Most importantly though, it gives you the confidence to move on to the next steps.

There are so many ways to go about proving to yourself that your theory is sound.  If you’re designing something that is similar in function to something that already exists (in size, main dimensions, weight, etc.), use that as your starting point.  For example, Plan Canvas’s Chair 00006 is a set of two bar stools that can be made from plywood.  The prototype for these stools was actually an existing shop stool that had the same outer locations for the feet, and the same height of the seat.  I then double checked the size of the seat by cutting up a piece of scrap wood and sat on it!  I didn’t want to make a seat that was too small; nobody would ever sit on something uncomfortable!!

On Chair 00002, I didn’t know if the back of the chair would be stable or not if someone leaned up against it.  I have a mechanical engineering background, so I ran some numbers using MathCAD and found that the design could have 200 lbs pushing on it and deflect less than a 1/16″.  So I had convinced myself that it was a good design before even building a prototype (and wasting time and material).

For Table 00003, I didn’t know if it could be a table AND a chair, so I built a prototype and sat on it.  Works great!

Another example of a prototype was for Chair 00004 - the main focal point of this series.  I originally didn’t design in cross braces for the legs.  I didn’t want them.  They didn’t look like they fit in the design.  But I wasn’t sure.  So I built up the bottom half of the chair from some wood and tried it out (see the picture below).  It didn’t work.Chair 00004 Prototype - Braces or not?

The seat was far to flimsy from side to side, and the dowels didn’t like being in a bending moment (the seat tried to bend the dowels out of the legs).  So I added cross braces to the prototype, and wammo!!  Great design (I like it better now with the braces), minimal changes to the concept, and it worked!!!

So here are some ideas for how you should run through prioritizing how to go about taking your design through the prototype stage:

Goal - A prototype will allow you to have confidence in your design and allow you to make your final design that will work and look right

  • Step 1 - Look at your design and based on your experience, look for areas that you question for either function or appearance
  • Step 2 - Figure out what you can build to mimic this area of concern - use only as much as you need, you may not need to build the whole thing
  • Step 3 - Build up your prototype.  Spend just enough time to prove out your function or appearance
  • Step 4 - Take note - With your prototype if front of you, make sure you take note of everything of value from it.  Mess with it, look at it, tip it over, whatever.  Use it and note important aspects of it!
  • Step 5 - Implement it - Refine your concept to incorporate what you’ve learned.  This is pretty important as we set up for the next steps.  Keep in mind sizes of parts, how many you really need, how to fasten them together, will you be able to assemble it, etc.


This part is really fun, since your concept (or part of it) will see the light of reality!  A little bit of your creation in the real world.  Remember - the prototype has value only if you learn from it!

The next portion of the series is practicality - how to achieve your desired piece while using as little material as possible!

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Building furniture plans, or doing any woodworking, means at some point you need to cut straight edges. My rule for choosing the right tool to cut with depends on the length and type of cut. If the cut is to be a straight cut for more than a few inches on an edge, the circular saw is the only way to go. It cuts far faster than a jigsaw, and doesn’t change angle very quick as you’re pushing it along. If the cut is curved or only a few inches, I’d go for the jigsaw because it is easy to maneuver and gives a clean edge. I would mention table saws here, but they are quite expensive for the occasional woodworker.

This post deals with cutting straight edges using a circular saw. In my experience, I would much rather cut really long pieces (like over 3 feet) with a circular saw rather than a table saw - its much easier to handle a small circular saw rather than a huge piece of board! The choice of buying a circular saw is outside the scope of this post, but many resources are available online.

The easiest way to cut straight is to clamp on a straight edge of some sort. I like to use extruded aluminum from some door framing (I found some in my basement), or use the machined edge of a piece of plywood, or even a piece of dimensioned lumber like a 2×4. The key of using anything is how straight the piece is, and where it is clamped to the workpiece. How straight the piece is depends on what you’re using. Where you clamp it is what the rest of this post will discuss.

For either a circular saw or a jigsaw, the critical measurement is the distance between the edge of the base plate and the end of the cut from the blade (see fig 1 and 2 below). This is the distance you need to clamp the inside edge of your straight guide. The fastest and most accurate way to measure this distance is to take a piece of scrap wood and cut it with the circular saw, and measuring where the edge of the base plate is to the edge of the cut. Take your time here.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Now using the same piece of scrap wood, try clamping on your guide, measured off a line you want to cut to. Take a cut and see how accurate you were. That’s it!

There are quite a few different guides on the market, but this way is far cheaper and great if you’re just getting into woodworking, or don’t have much coin. The main point to remember is that clamping wrongly will cost you in extra materials in the end.


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Today must be dowel day. I’ve always been a big fan of dowels because you don’t need any special equipment to make the joint (like a biscuit cutter, joiner, etc.). I always wondered how strong their ultimate yield was, and I found a great video on the subject. All the modern furniture plans from Plan Canvas use dowels, now I know just how strong those joints are!


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