Once upon a time there was an old man and an old woman, they had a daughter, Alyonushka, and a son, Ivanushka. An old man...
For those who see this furniture for the first time, the reaction usually consists of four letters - IKEA. Of course, there is a certain similarity: the assembly is carried out by the buyer. But there is a serious difference: neither nails, nor screws, nor glue are used during assembly - nothing.
Furniture that is assembled without any fasteners is, as the Chukchi from a joke would say, “a trend, however.” Take, for example, designer Paul Shenton. One day in 1998, he rented a small unfurnished apartment on the fourth floor.
It is clear that the problem with chairs, table, bed and other things had to be urgently solved. But in addition to everything, a narrow twisted staircase led to the apartment, and it was not possible to climb up, let's say, traditional furniture.
Shenton began to go around the shops in search of items that, firstly, he could afford for the money, and secondly, he could drag him up the stairs to new apartment. And then pull it out and, for example, throw it away, leaving the temporary shelter.
And although the same IKEA with its prefabricated furniture is not the most high-budget option in this case, the designer did not find anything suitable.
Perhaps fortunately: the Swedish supermarket could theoretically solve the problem, but then Shenton would not have become a furniture designer himself and would not have done what he did.
Here is a chair from one sheet of plywood (photo from thechipfactory.co.uk).
When designing his own furniture, Paul focused on what he thought was the most important thing: items should be easy to assemble and just as easy to dismantle.
The simplest solution was to fold the components through a system of slots, in other words, grooves to grooves, cut to cut.
Armed with only a jigsaw and a few sheets of plywood, Shenton built his first sofa.
Subsequently, the slot system chosen and refined over the course of three years became the corresponding trademark of SlotSystem, and Slot Furniture was born.
The firm is guided by four unshakable principles. The first is simplicity: the assembly and disassembly process is as simple as possible and does not require any tools.
The second is that there are no restrictions on the access of furniture to the consumer’s home, that is, he does not need to worry if the sofa will pass through doorway, and whether it will be possible to carry dinner table through the hall.
The third principle is adequate prices, and the fourth is modern design. That's it, that's all, that's how they live.
This is how a sofa from Slot Furniture is assembled without a single nail and glue (illustrations from slotfurniture.com).
We deliberately did not call Paul Shenton the inventor of the slot system for furniture assembly, although he probably has all the necessary patents.
The fact is that the principle itself has been known since time immemorial. Probably, you also had to cut pieces of paper into strips, make cuts on them with scissors and build paper sculptures from them.
But you still want to find the origins of furniture assembled without fasteners and tools. And the search results inevitably lead us to a man named Victor Papanek, who tragically died just when Paul Shenton rented an apartment on the fourth floor.
Not to say that this two-seater sofa from Slot Furniture was cheap - almost $500. But it is assembled without tools (photo from slotfurniture.com).
The name of this person should be known to everyone involved in industrial design. Papanek was born in Austria, graduated from high school in England, and worked in America. He was a designer, architect, anthropologist, writer and teacher.
But we are interested in the fact that Papanek is the author of the term "nomadic furniture". About her, he, along with James Hennessy (James Hennessy), wrote two books: "Nomadic Furniture" (1973) and "Nomadic Furniture 2" (1974).
By this term, he meant a minimum of tools and fasteners, light and cheap, but reliable materials, the ability to send furniture to a landfill without harming the environment, the availability of these items for low-income layers, and so on.
Thus, the furniture in the view of Papanek could be made almost of cardboard.
Victor Papanek's most famous book is Design For The Real World (photo from jidpo.or.jp).
It seems that IKEA designers could not help but pay attention to the concepts presented in books about “nomadic furniture”, because the Swedes are the first who come to mind as modern “embodiers” of these ideas.
What is the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to furniture production? Imagination draws huge workshops, dozens of workers, warehouses, shops and delivery services. Designers from England offer a different approach.
In the digital age, instead of going to the store at the table or chair you like, you can download drawings and make furniture yourself. To do this, the British have developed a series of projects called opendesk, the assembly of which does not use fasteners, nails, screws or tools.
Tables, chairs, cabinets are assembled from individual parts cut from a single plywood sheet on a 3D milling cutter. In fact, the furniture is a constructor, reminiscent of children's ship and aircraft model kits.
All parts in the furniture are fastened together by L and U-shaped locks and tongue-and-groove joints. Thanks to computer simulation, the assembly process is simple and intuitive.
Due to the simplification of all production processes and a small amount of waste, such furniture is cheaper than industrial production.
Having tested the idea and launched small production, the innovators went further. They created a unified electronic database of drawings and 3D models. The designers called this project Open Source Furniture.
From this database, being in any country of the world, the user can download the drawing of the furniture model he likes and modify it for himself: change the size, material or suggest his own design. After that, professional designers make appropriate changes to the basic project, creating on its basis new series. Further, the drawing becomes available for download to other users.
The main obstacle to the widespread adoption of this technology is the need to use 3D for the manufacture of furniture. To solve this problem, you can order a ready-made, cut kit, or, alternatively, simplify the drawings by removing complex curly elements and hidden grooves. In this case, the furniture can be made independently using minimum set tools: jigsaw and circular saw, but you will have to fasten the parts in the traditional way.
The further plans of the British include the maximum expansion of the geography of network production. To do this, it is proposed to purchase or rent a 3D milling cutter, or, if such equipment is already installed (for example, there is a CNC machine), download the appropriate software.
Because the whole the production cycle is to cut out details from plywood, then you can organize such production even in the garage. As conceived by the British, such an approach, as well as access to the "collective mind" of the database, will allow you to quickly rebuild production and independently produce a variety of furniture.
A similar idea, only in a simplified form, is offered by Israeli designer Ruti Shafrir. The girl developed a rack project, which is shaped like a honeycomb.
The rack is made of long plywood or aluminum plates with narrow slots. The workpieces are joined using the cut-to-cut method. The width of the slot depends on the thickness of the workpiece (the workpieces will be pressed together). The depth of the slot is equal to half the width of the plate.
To assemble the rack does not require tools, glue, fasteners. Thanks to the slots, the panels are inserted into each other, forming the original appearance and a stable design that fits well into the design of most interiors.
By changing the size of the panels, their thickness, length, finish, you can assemble a variety of racks to store a variety of things. For example:
Books
small things
French designer Benjamin Mahler decided to repeat the feat of the builders of the last century, who built huts without a single nail, and created a unique chair model "Chaise". Moreover, he assembled furniture exclusively by hand, using only strong wooden rods and an elastic band, vaguely reminiscent of ordinary bank elastic bands, which are used to fasten bundles of banknotes.
In addition to rods, tape and skillful hands, Benjamin Mahler didn't need anything else. Well, maybe a little ingenuity and imagination. The designer himself claims that his model is strong enough and able to withstand a load of up to 100 kilograms. Looking at the outwardly fragile chair, this is hard to believe. However, this is true.
A correctly calculated design correctly distributes the load on the seat surface, avoiding breakage of wooden rods. As for the elastic band, its quality is also beyond doubt. Exactly like the talent of the creator of the original chair.
By the way, a Japanese design student Daigo Fukawa created a similar one. Only in his case, wooden rods were replaced by hard wire, and in addition to chairs, the collection also includes a sofa, chairs and stools.
About 10-15 years ago in some magazine I read an article about the reconstruction of furniture made by ancient masters. The reconstruction was carried out on separate wooden elements found during archaeological excavations in Veliky Novgorod. The publication interested me, and I decided to try to repeat the technological methods used by Novgorod craftsmen seven or eight centuries ago.
The basis for the manufacture of all items of Novgorod furniture, various utensils, toys is the use of simple connection bent wooden rod with a rod with a figured head. Wooden rods for such furniture can be made from fairly thick willow branches or other freshly cut wood.
Tree branches as a source material do not have an ideal cylindrical shape along its entire length. Therefore, the grooves and necks are cut out and adjusted to each other manually with a knife and a chisel. Careful fit ensures the strength and reliability of the connection.
The dimensions of the groove and neck must match to ensure a secure connection. So. the length of the line of the cut transverse groove should be approximately equal to the circumference of the neck, and the height of the neck should be slightly less than the diameter of the bent rod at the groove. The depth of the groove is approximately equal to the radius of the rod.
Consider the order of manufacture the simplest, in my opinion, a piece of furniture - stool, It can be represented as a cube, in which the upper face serves as a seat. The cube, as you know, has 12 edges. In our case, the ribs of the cube-stool will be blanks bent at the places of the transverse grooves. To make a stool, you will need four identical blanks - rods with heads at the ends and two transverse grooves. The length of the blanks is determined by the dimensions of the future stool.
In the assembled stool, the transverse grooves of one workpiece (when it is bent) cover the neck of another header and are held by the head. The vertical ribs serve as the legs of the stool, the lower horizontal ribs will become the legs, and the upper horizontal ribs will serve to secure the seat. The latter can be made from plywood or thin boards inserted into longitudinal grooves, which are pre-made in the upper edges of the cube-stool (in blanks).
To facilitate the bending of the workpiece before assembly, it is necessary to steam or soak (mainly grooves) for 8-10 hours. The ends of the blanks with heads and necks must remain dry, otherwise, after the wood dries, the tightness of the connection will be broken
An ordinary trough with water is suitable for soaking the rods. It is necessary to lay blanks in it, pressing down their middle part with some kind of load so that the heads with necks protrude above the water level. To speed up the soaking process of wood, you can use hot water.
After making sure that the wood has become flexible, you can begin to assemble the stool. The neck of part B is inserted into one of the grooves of part A, and a wooden pin with a diameter equal to the diameter of the neck is temporarily fixed in the other groove. Part A is slowly bent around the neck of part B and the inserted pin. The ends of part A are temporarily tied with twine or twine. Then, in a similar way, part B is connected to part C, the ends of which are also temporarily tied with twine.
After that, the planks of the stool seat are inserted into the longitudinal grooves of the parts. The assembly of the stool is completed by connecting parts B and G.
The stool is ready, please sit down.
Using the described techniques, you can assemble not only a stool, but also a chair, a table and a number of other products.
For those who see this furniture for the first time, the reaction usually consists of four letters - IKEA. Of course, there is a certain similarity: the assembly is carried out by the buyer. But there is a serious difference: neither nails, nor screws, nor glue are used during assembly - nothing.
Furniture that is assembled without any fasteners is, as the Chukchi from a joke would say, "a trend, however." Take, for example, designer Paul Shenton. One day in 1998, he rented a small unfurnished apartment on the fourth floor.
It is clear that the problem with chairs, table, bed and other things had to be urgently solved. But in addition to everything, a narrow twisted staircase led to the apartment, and it was not possible to climb up, let's say, traditional furniture.
Shenton began to go around the shops in search of items that he, firstly, could afford for the money, and secondly, he could drag him up the stairs to a new apartment. And then pull it out and, for example, throw it away, leaving the temporary shelter.
And although the same IKEA with its prefabricated furniture is not the most high-budget option in this case, the designer did not find anything suitable.
Perhaps fortunately: the Swedish supermarket could theoretically solve the problem, but then Shenton would not have become a furniture designer himself and would not have done what he did.
Here is a chair from one sheet of plywood (photo from thechipfactory.co.uk).
When designing his own furniture, Paul focused on what he thought was the most important thing: items should be easy to assemble and just as easy to dismantle.
The simplest solution was to fold the components through a system of slots, in other words, grooves to grooves, cut to cut.
Armed with only a jigsaw and a few sheets of plywood, Shenton built his first sofa.
Subsequently, the slot system chosen and refined over the course of three years became the corresponding trademark of SlotSystem, and Slot Furniture was born.
The firm is guided by four unshakable principles. The first is simplicity: the assembly and disassembly process is as simple as possible and does not require any tools.
Secondly, there are no restrictions on the access of furniture to the consumer's home, that is, he does not need to worry if the sofa will pass through the doorway, and whether he will be able to carry the dining table along the corridor.
The third principle is adequate prices, and the fourth is modern design. That's it, that's all, that's how they live.
This is how a sofa from Slot Furniture is assembled without a single nail and glue (illustrations from slotfurniture.com).
We deliberately did not call Paul Shenton the inventor of the slot system for furniture assembly, although he probably has all the necessary patents.
The fact is that the principle itself has been known since time immemorial. Probably, you also had to cut pieces of paper into strips, make cuts on them with scissors and build paper sculptures from them.
But you still want to find the origins of furniture assembled without fasteners and tools. And the search results inevitably lead us to a man named Victor Papanek, who tragically died just when Paul Shenton rented an apartment on the fourth floor.
Not to say that this two-seater sofa from Slot Furniture was cheap - almost $500. But it is assembled without tools (photo from slotfurniture.com).
The name of this person should be known to everyone involved in industrial design. Papanek was born in Austria, graduated from high school in England, and worked in America. He was a designer, architect, anthropologist, writer and teacher.
But we are interested in the fact that Papanek is the author of the term "nomadic furniture". About her, he, along with James Hennessy (James Hennessy), wrote two books: "Nomadic Furniture" (1973) and "Nomadic Furniture 2" (1974).
By this term, he meant a minimum of tools and fasteners, light and cheap, but reliable materials, the ability to send furniture to a landfill without harming the environment, the availability of these items for low-income layers, and so on.
Thus, the furniture in the view of Papanek could be made almost of cardboard.
Victor Papanek's most famous book is Design For The Real World (photo from jidpo.or.jp).
It seems that IKEA designers could not help but pay attention to the concepts presented in books about “nomadic furniture”, because the Swedes are the first who come to mind as modern “embodiers” of these ideas.
What is the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to furniture production? Imagination draws huge workshops, dozens of workers, warehouses, shops and delivery services. Designers from England offer a different approach.
In the digital age, instead of going to the store at the table or chair you like, you can download drawings and make furniture yourself. To do this, the British have developed a series of projects called opendesk, the assembly of which does not use fasteners, nails, screws or tools.
Tables, chairs, cabinets are assembled from individual parts cut from a single plywood sheet on a 3D milling cutter. In fact, the furniture is a constructor, reminiscent of children's ship and aircraft model kits.
All parts in the furniture are fastened together by L and U-shaped locks and tongue-and-groove joints. Thanks to computer simulation, the assembly process is simple and intuitive.
Due to the simplification of all production processes and a small amount of waste, such furniture is cheaper than industrial production.
Having tested the idea and launched a small production, the innovators went further. They created a unified electronic database of drawings and 3D models. The designers called this project Open Source Furniture.
From this database, being in any country of the world, the user can download the drawing of the furniture model he likes and modify it for himself: change the size, material or suggest his own design. After that, professional designers make appropriate changes to the basic design, creating a new series based on it. Further, the drawing becomes available for download to other users.
The main obstacle to the widespread adoption of this technology is the need to use 3D for the manufacture of furniture. To solve this problem, you can order a ready-made, cut kit, or, alternatively, simplify the drawings by removing complex curly elements and hidden grooves. In this case, the furniture can be made independently using a minimum set of tools: a jigsaw and a circular saw, but the parts will have to be fastened in the traditional way.
The further plans of the British include the maximum expansion of the geography of network production. To do this, it is proposed to purchase or rent a 3D milling cutter, or, if such equipment is already installed (for example, there is a CNC machine), download the appropriate software.
Because the entire production cycle consists in cutting out details from plywood, then such production can be organized even in the garage. As conceived by the British, such an approach, as well as access to the "collective mind" of the database, will allow you to quickly rebuild production and independently produce a variety of furniture.
A similar idea, only in a simplified form, is offered by Israeli designer Ruti Shafrir. The girl developed a rack project, which is shaped like a honeycomb.
The rack is made of long plywood or aluminum plates with narrow slots. The workpieces are joined using the cut-to-cut method. The width of the slot depends on the thickness of the workpiece (the workpieces will be pressed together). The depth of the slot is equal to half the width of the plate.
To assemble the rack does not require tools, glue, fasteners. Thanks to the slots, the panels are inserted into each other, forming an original in appearance and stable structure that fits well into the design of most interiors.
By changing the size of the panels, their thickness, length, finish, you can assemble a variety of racks to store a variety of things. For example:
Books
small things
This bed is more like a constructor that can be easily assembled and disassembled, because there is not a single nail, screw and not a drop of glue in it! A great option for people moving from apartment to apartment.
A couple more pluses: the bed is quite easy to make and looks pretty. Go!
Step 1: Where to start and what will be required
You will need the most basic tool, whether it is manual or electric. A bed can be made using only a saw, a screwdriver, strong hands and a keen eye.
But if there is a power tool, then it’s a sin not to use it, I used a jigsaw and a drill (a screwdriver is also suitable for a drill). You will also need boards and a round block for legs with a diameter of 15 cm.
Sizes depend on your preferences and the size of your mattress.
Everything about everything should take you no more than 3-4 hours.
Step 2: Measure and saw
First, you need to decide on the size of the bed. I approached this simply - I took the dimensions of the mattress as a basis. As a rule, everyone does.
Step 3: Sawing the first joints
Pretty simple process, which is evident in the photo. What you should pay attention to is that the cuts must be even, and in order for the connection to be strong, the width of the cut should be slightly less than the width of the board that will be inserted into it (by about 0.7-1 mm). In this way, the board will have to be driven a little bit into the cut with a hammer.
Step 4: Mattress Support
When I said that the bed would be made completely without screws, I was a little cunning. Screws will still have to be used, but not a lot. With them we will attach the slats to the inside of the frame that we just made. Boards will be superimposed on these slats.
I fixed the slats with 10 screws on each side.
Step 5: Bed Legs
The strength of the bed depends on the legs, so be careful. The first step is to determine the height of the legs and cut them out of a round bar.
Then cavities are cut in the legs for the frame boards. They should also be slightly narrower (0.7 - 1 mm) than the thickness of the boards, so that the fastening is strong.
