Designing an Entrepreneur: August 2013

So it has been awhile since my last post. With school getting ready to begin and a bunch of projects I have been working on it has been some time and it's time for a few catch up posts.

First on the block is a picnic table I designed and built with the help of my friend Jimmy who runs Tombolo. He's a social entrepreneur who's company currently upcycles used billboards into tote bags and was actually one who encouraged me to start this blog.

Jimmy had asked me to design a new table for his family's house on Grass Lake, MI. They had a picnic table that was currently in disrepair and the wind off the lake required for a new table to have some significant weight to not be overturned or lost to wind, another problem they had encountered previously. Another restraint was reusing the loft wood he had left over from his dorm room consisting primarily of 2x6's and 4x4's. After a few questions and sketching I sketched up an idea I really liked:

Initial sketch

Something I really enjoy about wood is that each piece is inherently unique. They come in standardized sizes, (2x4, 2x6, 4x4, etc...) but each piece comes with a unique grain pattern and knots. Wood is unlike other standardized construction products that go through a lot of processes to become their final shape whereas wood is typically cut to size from it's tree, sanded and dried before shipment.

This aspect of wood led to part of the design's inspiration of each piece being cut to a unique length before being layered one next to another to form the table top and legs. The layering of wood also helps to add weight to the table, one of the other requirements for the final piece.

Now in constructing the table there were a few issues that required a few design changes. The first major change was cutting out a number of the legs. Originally the plan was to have a leg come off of each layer, however partway through we realized this would require way more wood than we had and that it would also add a difficult factor of leveling the table on any uneven ground, which a lawn inevitably is.

The next change was always going away from the drastic leg positioning in exchange for keeping the legs consistent with one another. This made construction much less complicated and again cut down on the amount required.

Finally when we started layering the wood I realized that we didn't have very many 2x4 pieces and that we should save them for the two benches that we had to make. This prevented us from mixing up many of the layers outside of the 2x6's as well as we did not have any 1x pieces of wood which I would like to have mixed in as well. We did however use some the 4x4's which look great but also added some problems for the structural integrity of the table top, another issue we had to deal with later.

The design ended up having a few unintended consequences. We realized that the design took away the typical hierarchy at the table where the two ends are typically dedicated to the "heads" of the table. Instead the ends are less usable with the jagged edges forcing users to all sit with others on the benches closer to one another. It also had the look of an audio equalizer hence where we got the name.

In the end there were many changes from the initial design but made for a great two weekend project that ended in a successful build. I'd like to make more for the future and after this initial project I wouldn't mind making a few final changes. Enjoy the photos.