I Made a Piece of Laser Cut Furniture!
I’ve had a vague urge to make laser-cut furniture ever since I got a laser cutter, but never really got around to it. Lots of people do this, so it’s by no means an original idea, but there’s a lot of room for creativity and puzzle-solving in the field. I used none of that to make my first piece of laser cut furniture.
Our mask business has been humming along on a steady diet of new fabric designs. It’s fun finding them, and people always seem to order masks from whatever new fabric we add, within a day or two. Which is how we got to the situation of have, currently, 170 different active fabric patterns available.
Any time a new fabric comes, the first thing we do is launder, press, and laser-cut it into our standard mask shape. That means we have 170 stacks of pre-cut mask fabric pieces to keep organized.
Up until today, that was an issue. Things were getting out of hand. What we needed was a set of custom-sized cubbies, lots of them, and they needed to be cheap, because who knows how long this business is going to last? About a month after the solution should have been obvious, I finally realized that I could simply make these cubbies, using tools and materials on hand.
Here it is: a 108-cubby shelving unit able to store 216 different stacks of fabric, two per cubby, plus the rectangular patches used for our straw hole masks. Start to finish this look less than 24 hours. I started working on the design around midnight, finished laser cutting the pieces around 4AM, woke up around 10AM to assemble them, and then spent the afternoon populating all the cubbies.
The fast turn-around was possible because (a) I’ve designed lots of things that need to fit together so I got this basically perfect first try, (b) I love my laser cutter, and (c) I happened to have stacks and stacks of suitable cardboard sheets on hand, because I’m working with the Tukam project. (I used 56 sheets of 24 x 36 inch white corrugated pads with almost no waste per sheet.)
Each cubby has a flat sheet of cardboard laid into it as a sliding “drawer”, with an oval hole in the front as a finger-pull. This lets you pull the contents out, which is important given how deep and narrow the cubbies are. A label with the names of the two fabrics inside is pinned to the front of the sliding sheet.
Cardboard is a realistic material to use because the total weight of all the fabric is maybe 50-75 pounds. I was worried about the whole thing buckling after it was loaded up, but so far it seems pretty stable. We’ll see if it’s still standing in the morning!
Cardboard shelves fully populated with mask fabric.
So many fabrics!
Mini-shelves slide out, making it easy to access the whole contents of each cubby.
The design is dead simple, just finger joints between the shelves and risers, with tabs on both that fit into a back plane that keeps everything square.
I’m pleased to say that I got the design exactly right first try, except for one row of notches on the very bottom of the back panel (which I realized were missing before I took the sheet out of the laser cutter, so I was able to add them and wasted zero cardboard).