Manufacturing guy-at-large.

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Bed

Added on by Spencer Wright.

I spent basically all weekend putting my bed together.

There are a few changes I'd make to the design. I hadn't thought the headboard hardware through completely, and need to add another set to the middle ribs. I also didn't get the slot depth exactly right - which doesn't matter for the platform but makes the headboard design non-optimal. This was kind of to be expected, as the endmill radius + a little slop + chamfered corners makes calculating it pretty tricky. It's *possible* that I'll redesign the headboard shelves to fix this, but so far it doesn't seem to matter too much.

Anyway, this project is mostly wrapped up at this point. Which feels great.

Plus, I got to put it to use immediately - and will be repeating that daily from here on out :)

Bed in progress

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Today a bunch of walnut plywood was delivered to Old World Mouldings, and Paul started cutting them almost immediately. 

Router toolpaths, courtesy Paul.

The first few parts are cut.

I'm currently feeling a tad bit nervous that my design is off in some way, but there's not a ton I can do about it until all of the parts are ready - which should be late this week. I did find a pretty big error midday yesterday - I had assumed that 5/8" walnut would be available, and it's not - and was able to correct it before production started. In the process, I went through as many of the details as I could think up, and I *think* everything is okay.

Short-run manufacturing is tough. If I were being really careful, I'd ask them to run all the parts for one bed first, and I'd test it to confirm it works as I want it to. But it's a bit of a trip to get there, and running three copies of the same part all at once is a lot easier for them. I still may try to do a mid-project mockup, but it'll be a bit of a trick to work it out.

Bed -> AutoCAD

Added on by Spencer Wright.

My bed project is coming along. The Inventor model is done (minus possibly some marginal edits) and I'm now processing it for production.

The way this will work: I buy ~20 sheets of cabinet grade plywood (probably black walnut, from Robert's Plywood) and have it shipped to Old World Moulding. They'll take my part list and cut the pieces up in a big overhead router. The parts will then be finished with a light, clear polyurethane.

In order to make sure that all the pieces have the intended grain orientation, Paul @ Old World asked me to lay them all out in AutoCAD. Which totally makes sense.

Except that I've basically never used AutoCAD. I played with it a bit as a kid (incidentally, it was also on a bed project), but I've only used it in passing as an adult. 

Anyway, I broke it out today and I think the results are passable. It took me a while to get the basics (units, etc) down, but I drew a bunch of 4'x8' rectangles to show the plywood sheet sizes, and then exported each part's face as a DXF and copy/pasted it onto a piece of plywood.

The result: Nineteen sheets should cover us for three full beds. I'm a little disappointed with some of the grain orientations, but it'll be fine. I'm also a bit worried about the nested parts (on the six nearly identical sheets on the left); we'll see what Paul says about that.

The only other thing of note is the red boxes on the right. Those parts have a beveled cut on one side, which needs to be done on a table saw (the router is only 2-axis), so I'm adding a bit of material to the parts.

I'm *hoping* that this shit gets cut this week. It'll be really nice to have a project wrap up :)