Week 4: Make Something Big

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The objective for this week was to "make something big" so I decided to make a new bed-side table for my room.

Background

Before, I was using a plastic Sterilite organizer as my bedside table which didn't work too well. The top would always come off and it sagged so everything fell toward the center. It looked pretty terrible too, as you can see from the picture.

So I decided to make a table that was stronger and that looked a little better too. I wanted to use the old drawers since they seemed to work pretty well.

Modeling

I used SolidWorks to create a 2D sketch of all the parts. I used the OSB but unfortunately I didn't measure the thickness beforehand and I used 7/16 inch (0.4375 inch) which turned out to be too small.

To hold all the pieces together I used 2 inch tabs sparated by 2 inch gaps with 0.125-inch-radius "dogbones". This worked great for my design. For the top piece I cut a pocket down to about half the thickness of the material which worked well except for a few minor issues that I'll explain later.

Milling

Milling was pretty straightforward but I made a lot of little mistakes. Going back to the pocket cut that I was talking about before. I made two small but annoying mistakes.

First, I used a compression bit to mill out the pocket which required a cut depth of about 0.25 inches; however, the compression bit only works on cut depths larger than about 0.375 inches. As a result, my pocket ended up with a really gnarled edge.

Secondly, my pockets shared an edge with the outer edge of the piece. It's not really obvious but since we set different tool paths for the pocket and the outer edge then the pocket needed the dogbone shape even where the mill was going to already cutout the part completely. I didn't realize this so I had to chisel out the remaining fillet by hand.

Finally, I didn't accomodate for small pieces moving during milling which I should have because the two smallest parts in my design popped out and got pretty mangled.

Also, like I said before, the thickness of the OSB was thicker than I had anticipated so nothing fit properly at first. Then Chris Dewart from the Architecture Wood Shop helped me cut off about 5 mills from all my tabs to allow the pieces to fit.

• Front

  

• Back

  

Adding The Light

I wanted to add something extra to my table to make it way different than my old one. I decided to add a diffuse light that could give it a little character. I thought also while I'm at it I'll add an outlet to the back so I don't have to reach behind my bed to plug stuff in.

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  Here are all the supplies I bought for the table

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  Here's the back with the hole for the outlet

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  Here's the outlet installed and wired up

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  Here's what the finished outlet looks like

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  Here's what the wiring looks like inside

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  Here are the lights with a remote switch

The Finishing Touches

Finally, I added the drawers from the old Sterilite organizer and painted the table black. Then I wrapped some paper in front of the Christmas lights to give it a diffuse glow. I just used paper to show the effect but eventually I plan on finding a better material.

The finished product looks better than I expected and the light works great! The drawers fit perfectly and now I have an outlet that's easier to reach.

Mistakes I Made

The biggest mistake I made was not measuring the OSB before milling the parts. It made a bunch of little problems after the parts were milled. It wasn't a huge issue but it did add some hassle. All the other mistakes I made were explained before and weren't that big of issues.

A small mistake I made that I never mentioned before was that I made the dogbone radii a little too big. This forced the machine to do multiple passes to remove the exess material. It doesn't seem like much but it doubled the milling time for all my parts. If I were to do it over again I would have made the diameters equal to the tool diameter.