My family owns a decent sized commercial millwork shop, which is a little different from furniture mass production, and the title of this post made the actual content look ridiculously silly. Cool demonstration for a home brew project, but a long long long way to go before any sort of threat to furniture builders like IKEA. Why that project received a grant when everything about that demo is available in any furniture manufacturer, beats me. We have a broad variety of crazy CNC machinery for production of architectural wood products, all 100% custom. We don’t bother with IKEA tables because everything else is far more profitable combined with that we don’t have a viable path to selling 1,000,0000 cheap tables to be an IKEA
The advantage of the computer is not mass-production but mass customization. How about putting something like this in the big-box hardware stores? They will cut wood for you, but they will not make anything but simple straight cuts, and the cost per cut is high. I like to try to make things from wood, but I am a little too clumsy and accident-prone to want to do anything with power tools. If there was idiot-proof CAD on-line at the hardware store site where I could mess around with designs, see that everything fit together and came out OK in 3D, and then order the pieces by credit card, I'm in.
This is my dream as well: I’d love to have a system where I could do something like a simple aided Sketchup plywood model, pop down to the home mega center, and watch as my chosen grade of plywood was CNC / Laser cut into the shapes I’m looking for. I could imagine people doing custom dimension kitchen cabinets by refining a 3d model with some initial defaults.
I'm a little surprised Home Depot and Lowes haven’t already piloted something like this. Maybe the return on R&D is projected to be too low?
I think push it a little more consumer-friendly and have made to order furniture that you pick up locally. Completely customized at a normal price.
I believe this is where fashion will go. Items made specifically for the person wearing it (perfect fit every time) but at a cost of mid-level fashion because of advances in manufacturing.
This demo, coupled with the headline, really hits a sour note. So much about a piece of furniture you care enough about to design and place into your home is not about getting just the right number of rays on your stellate-pattern tabletop.
It's more about the exposed edges, the joinery, and the surfaces you will touch. That's where your eyes are attracted. That's the tough stuff to resolve cleanly when you design a piece. And that's a part that the knock-together construction here is not going to help with.
I guess this might have a place with very simple pieces that really need to fit in a certain space, say, between a wall and a fireplace.
A miter saw with some janky robots sawing what looks to be a flimsy piece of pine... is going to threaten IKEA?
OpenSCAD and parametric design is cool and all. But this is asinine. That's the most charitable way I could put any of this nonsense.
> AutoSaw is a fun proof of concept and a glimpse at a potential future: One where a robotic wood shop is part of your local home improvement store’s lumber department. Ready to cut/drill/route pieces for you to take home and assemble.
First, you don't go to your local Home Depot for furniture-quality lumber. Second, CNC furniture already exists and is way more impressive than this demo[1] Third, CNCs are robots too.
I see this sort of devaluation of design and craftsmanship often in DIY and elsewhere from people that don't know much about what makes IKEA special and what woodworkers actually do. IKEA sells solid designs at affordable prices using low cost but mostly durable materials. Woodworkers, on the other hand, use high quality lumber, precision jointery, and careful finishing. The finishing alone can sometimes take as long as building the entire project. They carefully avoid knots and trouble spots, they know which way to cut and glue according to grain, and they know about wood movement. They know that hard and soft words are different, and they know that, well, there are different types of wood. Shocking, right?
I'll take a solid design by actual designers rather than some parametric customizable monstrosity. Flat pack or Eames. It really doesn't matter.
Here's the commercial equivalent.[1] There's a whole industry making customized kitchen cabinets. There's design software and CNC machines. There's Cabinet Vision (software), and Cabinets Online (custom cabinets as a service.) This is a well developed area.
Seems like their engineering team had a serious NIH problem. This project should have been all software, and done in partnership with a local CNC-based mill if they couldn’t get some loner equipment / shop time from a manufacturer.
absurd. this automated chop saw will no more challenge IKEA than a kid making balsa airplanes will challenge Airbus. It's interesting, but the ridiculous hyperbole has to stop.
IKEA owes its success to clean design and the flat pack. not necessarily manufacturing techniques
