You Wouldn’t Download A Chair…But You Could

[Morley Kert] had a problem. He’s a big fan of the lovely Fortune Chair from Heller Furniture. Only, he didn’t want to pay $1,175 for a real one. The solution? He printed his own instead!

The basic concept is simple. Capture or recreate the geometry of the fancy expensive designer chair, and then print it out on a 3D printer. That would be easy, except for scale. Chairs have to be both big enough to seat humans, and strong enough to carry their weight. For the average 3D printer owner, meeting the big requirement is difficult, since most printers are quite small compared to chairs.

[Morley] gets around this in the typical fashion—he prints the chair in multiple segments. Indeed, we’ve seen [Morley] tackle a similar project before, too. Only, last time, he had the benefit of a print farm and some easily-accessible geometry for the target object. This time, he’s working very much more from scratch, and chose to print everything at home. That made things quite a bit harder.

Scaling up is never as easy at it seems at first!

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Several shelf boxes of various widths are held together by brightly-colored plus-sign-shaped connectors.

3D Printed Shelf Connector

Sometimes, you really need a custom shelf. Whether you have a weird-shaped space, weird-shaped stuff, or just want something different, making your own shelving can make your place more like home. The Plus Shelf by [shurly] aims to make building your own shelves a little easier with a 3D printed bracket.

These connectors aren’t just sitting flush against the wood of the shelf. Each end of the + sign actually sits in a 3/8″ drilled recess, giving a more secure fit. The pieces were printed on an Objet and then dyed in various bright shades to really make the shelving pop. The cubbies were assembled with biscuits after cutting down a sheet of plywood to the appropriate sizes. The 45˚ angles around the edges of the cubbies make the whole shelf system that much nicer.

The final shelf has a little wobble, but that’s probably because dying the shelf connectors made them “bendy.” Because of the instability with the friction fit, the shelf connectors were super glued into the shelf boxes. [shurly] hopes that a metal version of the connectors might be able to eliminate these problems in the future.

This shelving system not your cup of tea? Maybe you’d prefer this Vintage Adjustable Shelving Method or this MP3 Player Shelf.