Bruce signed up a few months ago with the grand intentions of building his own futon from some plans in an old woodworking magazine – his rationale was that futons are built like crap and he could do it better and end up with something that would look a lot nicer and last a lot longer than what was available from a big box store.
Completed build
Working from the plans, he purchased rough lumber and obtained free wood flooring cutoffs and worked on joining and planing them to the necessary dimensions. Because most of the pieces were futon length, they couldn’t fit on the smaller 36″ x 25″ router, so he needed to use the 4’x8′ wood router. Using OpenSCAD, he laid out a lot of pockets and stacked the boards together to save time, the mortise joints would otherwise have been a huge amount of work even with a jig:
A man and his machine.
He used CamBam to take the DXF from OpenSCAD and turn it into code for the CNC router (which runs a Linux CNC controller), this tells the router how to cut the patterns and which order to cut them in:
One of the hardest parts is transferring the alignment around the legs of the futon, because it’s made from 4 sections of frame and numerous slats that all have to be lined up, it’s amazing how nice it looks assembled:
At the end of the day, building a futon takes a lot of time and focus:
The best part about his work, is he made it into our spot on the Big Ten Network.