Totally done

My desk is complete and everything went as smooth as possible today. Overall I am very please with the outcome of this project, I was able to work with my hands and use analog tools like I did for the first project but I also stepped it up a notch by incorporating digital design into the piece. I used the vinyl cutter and the laser cutter for this project and the results couldn't have been better, and now that I know how to use these tools I will definitely try and incorporate them into my future work.

As far as the desk goes I am in love with it - not only does it completely outweigh the old version in aesthetics but it serves as a great source of inspiration for me while I'm sitting at the desk working. It's a reminder of all the hard work I put in to this and how with the right tools you can do just about anything you set your mind to.

Here is the entire process from start to finish:


(Original plan)



(quick sketch for possibility of adding vinyl)



(digital sketch to examine different designs)


( Final choice for vinyl design)


(The desk disassembled and sanded)


(Here it is with the bottom half painted, the vinyl cut out and ready to go, and the acrylic backboard laser etched)


(close-up of the acrylic)


(here's the top half of the desk in the process of being painted)



(Here's the blue light that I took from my computer to illuminate the laser cut acrylic)


(In order for the light to reach the top of my desk I simply spliced the wires with some old RCA wires I had laying around and plugged it back into my computer so the acrylic lights up when I turn my computer on, very cool)



(The very tedious process of applying the vinyl)


(The completed vinyl, looks just like I imagined it)


(Installed brand new brackets for my keyboard drawer so I wouldn't have to worry about the damned thing falling out on my lap anymore)



(Here's the acrylic backboard screwed in place)





(Here's the whole thing re-assembled but still not quite finished)


(I screwed in a couple hooks to hold the blue light in place. The tape is covering the top portion of the light so it all gets focused down on the acrylic)


(And here it is in action!)




(close up of the lit-up acrylic. This is probably my favorite part of the desk)



(And finally here's a good 'ol fashioned before and after picture)

Major progress

It has been a pretty productive week for me; I painted the lower half of the desk, the sliding keyboard drawer piece, and the shelf pieces. I also finalized my design for the vinyl thats going on the main desk surface and got it cut out as well as getting my design laser etched into the acrylic piece which serves as the backboard for the shelves. I have everything I need scattered in one place, now I just need to put everything together. I'm still debating whether I should apply the vinyl to the desk then paint over it to create a negative image, or to just apply the vinyl on top of the painted surface. Either way I should be able to finish the bulk of the work today.

Here's some photos of the progress:




The laser cut acrylic looks beautiful, and even more so with the blue light shining through it.


Here's the design i decided on. The grey lines represent the vertical panels which hold the shelves and the top piece together

Updates!

So as expected I spent a good deal of my weekend sanding down this whole freaking desk, this operation required multiple energy drinks and about 3 sheets of sand paper. On top of taking the desk apart and sanding it I've been working on some design layouts for the vinyl in illustrator, I'm also working on a quick prototype image of the whole desk with the designs on it so I can see what it looks like and maybe decide on some colors. Those will go up later tonight when I'm finished with them. As of now I have some pictures of the sanding process and my supplies.


Here's the desk in its original state:


Here it is cut in half. The rest of the pieces were too stubborn to come off so I figured it would be easy enough to sand and paint in two big chunks.



And here it is all purty and sanded. I've already used those two cans of black on the bottom half of the desk so I imagine I'll need at least 2 or 3 more cans of black, no big deal though it's a minor investment.

Sketches + update

I have a rough sketch for the design I want to lay out on my desk with the vinyl. I am very fascinated with wave patterns, fractals and radial designs so I decided to use that as my main element. I want the desk to look like waves are coming out of corners and seams of the desk and emanating in different directions. This project isn't intended to be a piece of fine artwork that questions some authority or makes you think deeply about something, the design is purely aesthetic. Like the last project this one is about taking something I use everyday that is sucky and cheap and make it work better and make it look like it's worth a hell of a lot more than it really is. Tonight I plan on taking the desk apart and going through the grueling task of sanding every piece front and back - by hand... I could sure go for a power sander right now. Once the sanding is over with I'll have to get all my designs drawn out on illustrator and cut out in vinyl (instead of just drawing out huge circles and using up lots of material to print those I'll probably make several segmented arcs that go to one circle). I'll keep updating as the process continues.


*keep in mind this sketch isn't accurate in terms of color, the circles will be a brownish color of my desk and the rest will be a glossy black exactly like the nightstand

Final idea for final project

So after this weekend I've decided to switch gears a little bit for this project. I've kind of lost interest/faith in my lightbox art project and have re-directed my interests towards customizing my computer desk. I feel like this idea fits better into my theme of customizing things in my surroundings to fit my aesthetic and functional needs. I also really liked the idea that John put out there about applying vinyl over furniture and applying paint over it to make a negative space design on the piece. So I've been working on some sketches of designs I want to see on my desk and so far I'm working with a theme of radiating waves and circular patterns. I will post some detailed sketches once I have all the details and designs figured out. On top of painting and redesigning the desk I'll be fixing the keyboard drawer and making some new organization systems for cables and general clutter around my desk.

3 ideas for final project

I've scanned in 3 sketches of ideas for where I can go with this project.

1)My first one and the one I'm pretty intent on producing is a light box with custom laser-etched pieces of translucent acrylic on the surface, so it's like a projected still piece as opposed to just a plain print. This idea started when I noticed there were 4 florescent light tubes in my shed not being used at all so I figured I could use some cool new artwork around my house and at the same time put these lights to use.

2)The next idea is very similar to my first night stand project in that I have a piece of furniture (My computer desk) which is something I use several hours a day every day and is aesthetically displeasing and somewhat dysfunctional. My plans for the desk are to simply fix the broken track system for the broken keyboard drawer thing, make some sort of new organization system for my shelves and the mess of wires, and to refinish the whole thing in black. This is not a very intense project so if I were to do it I would probably do it in conjunction with another one of these.

3)My final idea is one that I actually had for the first one but am now transfering it up to this project since I'm doing an over-arching theme of DIY re-design/enhancing my surroundings and it fits pretty nicely in that category. My closet does not have a door, which is not the end of the world, but it is kind of annoying. So instead of just buying a door I'd like to buy the pieces of wood myself and fabricate the thing from scratch maybe even with a custom laser-etched design.

So far I really like the idea of creating custom projection artwork, and if time permits I would really like to do the desk project on the side. I need to go check out the laser cutter and see what types of acrylic look best under fluorescent and to make sure everything is feesable and will look good before I dive into it.

Summary of my experience with the first project

I really really enjoyed the entire process of this project from planning it out by hand to making the entire thing by hand. It's been nice stepping away from the computer for once and getting my hands dirty and learning some new and very useful things. Obviously this project is very self-oriented and personal but I feel like people can learn from my project how cheap and relatively easy it is to do these things yourself. I am in love with my new piece of furniture, and hopefully I'll be able to keep it for the rest of my life as a reminder that I don't need to pay someone a crap load of money to make me a well designed nice looking item, and I'll know that mine is original, no one else has this and that has a value that money can't match. At this point I am thinking about staying the course for the second project and continue with customizing furniture or any other item(s) around my house that don't meet my satisfaction. I want to have this next project be on a slightly larger scale (do more than just one item, maybe customize something other than furniture), and perhaps even advertise what I'm doing to help get my message out there.

FINISHED

The project was a complete success! I got the new top panel pieces nailed in after the glue set, slid in the drawer, and put little rubber pads on the corners of the glass so it can sit securely on the panels. This thing honestly looks way cooler than I ever imagined it would.






Here it is in action:


Lookin sexy

so close to finishing

I've made quite a bit of progress since the last post. So far I've added several layers of paint on everything (4 cans of spray paint to be exact, I should have used primer), after a couple of days of painting, drying, and more painting everything was finally ready to start re-assembling:


To start I screwed in the rollers for the original shelves.


Next the shelves went in.


So far so good. Everything fits just like it did before




Here it is with the drawer faces on and the new handles in place.



Got the new rollers installed on the drawer platform and the side panels.




Drilled a big hole in the back panel piece for wires to go through.


I then glued all three of the new top panels together just so it would be easier to get the whole thing situated and nailed into the top. I'm going to let the glue set overnight just to be safe, and because I have the time to wait.

More progress...

I got a really good chunk of my work done for this project on sunday. I got my nightstand totally disassembled, got my pieces of particle board cut out, and spent a good 2 or 3 hours sanding absolutely everything by hand. After all that I was able to paint a couple of layers of black lacquer over every piece of wood, its been curing for 48 hours as of today and is ready for the backsides to be painted and anything else touched up, then either tonight or tomorrow I will re-assemble everything and be done with the nightstand. Here are some photos:

Here's all the individual pieces of the nightstand and the particleboard with my measurements on it




Here are the extra pieces I need from the particleboard




And here are all of the pieces drying with the laqeur layered on

Making some progress...

I took a trip to goodwill and home depot today to pick up all my necessary supplies and surprisingly I got everything I needed in one quick trip, my expenses totaled to about $30, a bit pricey but not so bad considering im turning a piece of junk into a nice high quality custom piece of furniture instead of just throwing it away and spending $150 on some "designer" piece of crap. Here's a list of all the items I gathered:

1) A slightly damaged but still usable piece of medium density particle board (the same stuff my night stand is made of), its just big enough for me to cut the pieces I need without having too much waste, and since it was out of the scrap bin it only cost me 1$.

2)A 14" x 17" piece of glass that I scavenged out of a crappy old picture frame from goodwill. The glass isn't quite as thick as I'd like it to be so we'll see how it holds up, if it breaks it should be pretty easy (and cheap) to replace. - $5

3) 3 pieces of sandpaper - $3

4) 2 cans of high quality lacquer black spray paint - $10

5)1 big tube of wood glue - $3

6)2 nice looking brushed metal handles for the drawers - $4

7)metal rolling mechanisms for the sliding platform - $6


It's too late for me to be cutting up wood and going to town on this thing so I'll get started on it first thing tomorrow. There's a pretty good chance I could get this whole thing done tomorrow, in which case I might consider tackling one of my other proposals and have it be a multi-part project. We'll see how it goes tomorrow

Off to a good start with the first project

So I decided to go with my first proposal for this proejct, which is to re-construct my night stand and hack my cd player to work with an ipod. Here's the original proposal:
So what I've done up to this point is worked on the cd player and successfully hacked it to work with my ipod. I documented the whole process to show how it was done:

Here is the cd player in its normal / unmodified state:
\Here is what it looks like on the inside after I take off the outer pannels:


Originally my plan was to solder a simple audio cable onto the board itself, but after investigating trying to figure out where to solder i realized it was too complicated and there was an easier way to make the ipod work with this thing. I had an old DIY project from Johns 252 class which was pretty similar to this (http://uoregon.edu/~cwilson9/artd252/DIY/1.html). As cool as this little jambox was i never really used it, and I figured by taking that apart and using bits from that to make it work with my cd player would be more useful. So my new idea was to not just solder directily into the cd player but to use this extra chip as a basic amplifier for the ipod and then just wire the output directly to the cd players' speaker output. So technically this method wouldn't be using the cd player at all to play the ipod, just the speakers.

So I took out the old chip from the jambox and proceeded to solder in the input wire for the ipod and the output wires for the left channel.


Here is the amplifier chip:And here it is with all the wires soldered in place:



Once all the wires were soldered and figured out it was time to soder the left and right channel wires into the cd players output.

I unscrewed the output pannel so i could work with it easier.

Heres what it looks like with the wires soldered in place :

After trying for quite a while to fit the chip into the cd player I realized it just wasn't going to happen so my only option was to secure the chip to the back of the cd player and cut a couple of grooves for the wires to feed into. Kind of ghetto but also really cool and dorky looking.

So that's it! I hot glued to ipod chip to the back and it fits perfectly, and looks pretty sweet. To the naked eye it looks just like the ipod is plugged straight into the cd player like it would any other, which is what my goal was for this part of the project, so it was a sucess.

The next part of the project is to start collecting parts for the actual nightstand. I need to find a good solid piece of glass to fucntion as the table top, some good pieces of plywood, some rollers for the drawer thing, and probably a lot of other odds and ends. This weekend I plan on making lots of visits to home depot, bring recycling, and goodwill to start collecting these parts, and if I'm lucky I can start actually working on it this weekend.