One of the main reasons for purchasing my CNC milling machine was to build my own furniture and lamps.
I’m neither a carpenter nor a product designer, but thanks to 3D printing I’m now quite comfortable with Autodesk Inventor. At the moment, however, I am still working on the necessary knowledge of the materials required for furniture construction and the corresponding sources of supply from the surrounding area. So the first own furniture has to wait a bit.
Fortunately, there are already some Open Source Furniture projects from international designers, some of which provide really great designs to the public.
The community is still very clear, but interesting projects and designs are already there to immediately and with little previous knowledge to make their own furniture.
In the following I have listed the most interesting projects that I have come across lately.
opendesk
opendesk is probably the largest open source furniture collection that enables designers, makers and consumers to exchange ideas and get in touch with each other. Global design and local fabrication.
There are already a large number of really beautiful designs here. What I really like is that there have been some new designs recently. So the opendesk project seems to be vital and to rely on a relatively large community.
AtFAB
AtFAB has a similar approach as the platform opendesk. The designs of AtFAB tend to be quite simple. Very straight cuts throughout and with a little more focus on the practical function of the objects.
SketchChair
SketchChair seems to have been one of the first Open Source Furniture projects with a very interesting approach: Draw your own geometry, parameterize it and export the CAD files from your own application.
SketchChair offers besides the design software also ready-made, popular designs directly for download.
Unfortunately the development of the software as well as the coummunity around SketchChair seems to have fallen asleep. The forum is almost dead and the Java application is very unstable. But if you like the rib design of the objects, you should be patient.
APTEK Bar
In Saint Petersburg stands the APTEK Bar, which was furnished by Lesha Galkin with an incredibly beautiful interior design. The designs for the furniture are available for download.
Alejandro Palandjoglou
Alejandro is a product designer and has put some of his designs online for download via Instructables.
The stool and the lounge chair were my first replica projects with the CNC machine and really produced a great result. Many thanks to Alejandro. Have a look at his website: alepalan.com
Attention with nearly all projects: Take a close look at the .dxf /.svg files beforehand. A lot of the projects are dimensioned in inch. The problem lies not only in the conversion of the Anglo-American length units into the metric system but also in the relation of the corresponding materials. One of my first projects was a chair that was dimensioned in inches, but for which there was no thick material in the DIY store. The solution was to use Illustrator to re-set all the connectors. It is generally not a bad idea to deal with Illustrator in the CNC sector.