Week of 4/7 - 4/11

This week I went back to working on the bedside table that I had designed before. I used this week to cut out all of the pieces for the table on the laser cutter. I had already finished the design and saved the DXF files needed to cut out all of the pieces last week. By doing this, I was able to focus on the assembly of the table. I ran into a few problems while cutting out the pieces I needed for this project on the laser cutter. The laser cutter is notoriously bad at cutting out wood pieces of thickness over 1/8". When I went to cut out my files on the laser cutter, the wood simply would not cut all the way through and caused great frustration. I asked Mr. L why some of my cuts were not working because I managed to cut 2 pieces before asking for any help. Mr. L pointed out to me that my files were not correctly saved because of a piece of information that I forgot to check before trying to laser cut. The files in the laser cutter that are saved as PDF files need to have a stroke width of .1 pixels. However, I forgot to check this when I saved my files, and I had saved them with a stroke width of 1 pixel. I had to go back and fix my remaining files to finish cutting out the rest of my pieces. After I did this, I stopped having issues with the laser cutter and was able to finish cutting out all the pieces.

After cutting out all the pieces, I began assembling the table. I tried to glue the pieces together, but I found that the pieces would not lie flush with one another when I glued them together. The way I assembled it was by attaching all of the pieces to the tabletop piece and connecting the legs after it was secured to the top. While I was assembling it, I noticed that the tabletop piece was not perfectly straight, and made it so that the table would not attach correctly to the legs of the table. This was because the tabletop wood was bent/warped out of shape, and made it so that there was no real anchor for the glued pieces to rest on. I now have to recut this one part, but I have not gotten the chance to do it yet, and I plan on doing it on Friday so I can finish the assembly of the table before the weekend. I hope to finish up the table entirely next week and take it home to put it in my room.