We're finishing our basement and I wanted to build a pair of floating nightstands for the basement bedroom. As part of the build process, I wanted to see how much of a custom furniture build could be done on the CNC. Since I was making a pair, this seemed like a perfect test and something I've never done.
Spoiler alert, for those of you that think the CNC is the easy button, you just couldn't be more wrong and it demonstrates your ignorance. While some things were easier and in the end the design process was rewarding, there was a LOT of extra preparation and planning long before any cutting took place.
I started with a simple CAD drawing so I could pull the basic panels into V-Carve pro and setup the sheets/layers/toolpaths for the nightstands, taking care to remember that one design will be a mirrored image of the other.
I then went to the typical milling process, getting the rough walnut boards properly thicknessed, jointed and ready for glue-up. Once the panels were all built, I had to decide tops/bottoms/sides and remember that a lot of the milling would be on the inside pieces, due to the fact I will have a groove to accept a 22/32" walnut ply insert. I also inset the back far enough I could add a BB French cleat for eventual hanging.
Part of the motivation behind using my CNC was designing a drawer front. I created several textures, overlayed them to give a bit of a random look as well as pulled in elements of varying depths for an overall beautiful, custom look. There was a lot of hand sanding after this to cut down all the rough textures, but overall well worth the effort.
For connecting the panels I still went blind tenons using my Domino. I also had to round over (3/4) and hand sand/round the final pieces before assembly.
After a lot of hand sanding and finishing touches, I built the drawer boxes (maple), inset an MDF ply of walnut and installed Blum 9" undermount drawer slides. One thing that was pretty cool is how "identical" the two parts were. This made marking for dominos and building drawers easier because; one, the final dimensions exactly matched my drawings and two, they were identical mirror images.
I stained with Osmo (first time using this) and applied 2 coats. Overall the texturing and final look came out great. It will be several weeks beofre I can install them, so I'll update the post at that time. Overall the design process was fun, rewarding and just as much work as using "traditional" means. If you're building hundreds of these, then the up front work is worth it, but for custom one (or two in my case) off pieces, you need to decide how best to use the CNC just as you would any other tool.
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Originally Posted by Michael Burnside
