Schoolproject: Furniture in Movement (2006/ 2007)

Next project: Furniture in Movement.

For this assignment we had to design and make a piece of furniture which had at least 1 moving part (Turntable, hinges or other things you could come up with).

Also we were obligated to shape it into a Rietveld design.

I'm not particularly font of Rietveld design. It's very abstract and modern, while my heart lies with the antique and curlier things.

But it's an assignment, so we have to do it.

Finished product

I came up with a 4 drawer cabinet which could turn in the middle. The idea was that it would be handy on a table to have 4 drawers which you could reach by spinning the object. But it wasn't that handy after all (saying it's a dust collector now ;))
The turning of the color settings made it look like a very simplified Rubix cube.

About the making:
Rietveld is famous for his black lines connecting colorful plates. So in my design this had to be reflected as well.
I made several wooden bars for each side of the plates. There were made black with the top sides painted pink.
Both red and blue panels got a drawer inside, which was also either red or blue. But since the drawers were the same size they could be swapped between each other. So you could have a red panel with a blue drawer or a blue panel with a red drawer (or their matching color).

To connect the bars to the panels I used lamellos. They are an invisible bond like dowels, but they are more narrow and width like some sort of cookie. They are easier to place and are a better solution than dowels for joining plates.

It was quite a paintjob and a puzzle to fit all the pieces together:

The puzzle begins

So many colors; the orange, black/pink ones
aren't even displayed here.

After a lot of puzzling and glueing I ended up with two separate boxes.
The upper box had to be able to turn around on the lower one. This was done by making a giant bearing made from 2 wood pieces, which were sawn into 2 circles and with a groove grinded inside.
In the groove there were marbles placed and in the middle a big screw held everything together

Drawing of the bearing

Close up of the marble bearing

To finish I added 4 pieces of wood to the top box to prevent the box from spinning around unwanted.