Bedroom renovation

I recently completed my own bedroom’s renovation project. The project originally started from a new mattress, which is much thicker then my previous one and happens to be as high as my upper bunk frame. This leaves me with no safety height on the side frame to prevent me falling to the ground. I need to remake a bed frame that is higher then the original one, and the easiest way is to add an extra piece on top.

My friend Ricci Wong from Art Lab (HK) who owns a 4 ft by 4 ft CNC router, is kind enough to lend me his machine for routing some surface decoration on the bed frame. I start designing by looking at a 4 ft by 8 ft plywood dimension. Drawing a shape that is high enough for the bed frame, and shaping the geometry such that I could use half of the board for the bed frame, the remaining half of it to be a table top that would be right below my bed. I made the separation line valid for both use, where the concave part means the entrance to my bed and negative of it creates a bump on my working table that becomes my arm rest.

I have seen a door design in the US that used a CNC router to add toolpath-decorations to a MDF door. The effect is brilliant and elegant, the surface is created by routing the surface with a round end mill bit. The end mill cost only 40HKD, stayed sharp for the first half the process, and the second half of the pass had the wood pretty hairy. The plywood is 18mm thick, with pretty smooth top and bottom ply (it was not until the router cuts into the wood I start to realize the middle-plys were of much lower quality, I eventually have to paint it white.)

The tool path is drawn in Grasshopper and divided into half to fit the 4 feet machine, I have to mode the piece of wood and realign it to the machine . The post-process is done by MadCAM (using curve following) , but eventually I figured out how to do it directly in GH using some point location extraction and string manipulation techniques (for anyone without CAM software, this would be a good method)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I applied wood stain and a type of German-made Matte Lacquer on the table top, and it proofed to be of good finish quality. However, whehn I tried to apply it on the bed frame, the result looks a little bit creepy, because the different plys of the wood is absorbing the stain is a different rate because of its direction. Some portion are very dark while some are light, making it look like a snake’s skin. I could bare sleeping in a snake every night and I decided to paint it white.

Download script if interested: bed_CleanedUp.gh