The Woodshop Shed

Yet another night stand X 2

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


We recently moved so I have plenty of new opportunities for woodworking. We bought an old headboard for the bedroom and I decided to build a pair of night stands that would hopefully maintain it's rosewood and dark wood feel. I spent a couple of months noodling with my graphics software trying to come up with something that I felt like building and that my wife would OK and this is the result.I still like working with a mix of materials so this design has a glass top, a steel cantilevered support backbone, stainless pipe, nickle trim, and solid and plywood walnut. Fusion 360 was used to model the design and the mind map software Freeplane was used to think through all of the design, purchasing, build and assembly details. I have not seen Freeplane mentioned much but I use it all the time (it's free and no affiliation). These two programs allowed me to go through 12 revisions to my design before I picked up my first tool and 4 in the middle of the build. I was able to pre-think and plan what I was doing and this ensured that none of the screws interfered and I did not “paint myself into any corners”.I ordered the glass tops first since their size could not be tweaked during the build and so everything else needed to fit around them. I was lucky to have in my stockpile of stuff “that I would use someday”, some rosewood veneered MDF boards that I had salvaged from a roadside discard. They had been waiting for 12 or so years for a worthy project. Preserving this veneer while sawing things to size, sanding, edge banding and glueing boards was a significant challenge during both the design and build phase. I used full extension soft close drawer slides. The pipes were ordered precut, but the tolerances were loose and I had to grind them a little to keep everything level. Polishing the pipes was a pain but jigging them up on my lathe helped. There is a channel in the back two pipes for cord management. There are steel plates at both ends of the pipes with 3/8 threaded rods providing cantilever support. I was able to cut the plates to shape using a “thick metal” blade on a jig saw. As usual I over engineered the design/materials, the total weight for each stand is around 80 lbs. I used slippery levelers so they are moveable for making the bed. It took about 10 retired hobby weeks to complete both once I started building.Nor everything is perfect. The nickle accent strip is a little ripply because .2mm was too thin, and as usual I hurried the finishing, so some spots are not up to snuff. You have to look close to observe these flaws so overall I am happy with the final results.

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