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Designing a flatpack bed


I just moved into an unfurnished apartment and my professional woodworker friend just got a plywood-sheet-sized CNC router, so I’ve been designing myself a bedframe. The rough scope / requirements: Christoffer Martens’s Siebenschlafer bed is probably peak flat-pack brutalism: I had a go at making a taller version for myself in CAD: but it became clear that this minimalist design definitely won’t hide the multitude of boxes we’ll be storing underneath.

Since 18mm 13-ply CP/CP Baltic birch is €150/sheet (thanks Putin), rather than throwing more wood at the problem, I’m trying to come up with a design that leans into precise, complex cuts enabled by CNC — perhaps some kind of frame skeletons that can be covered with rattan or fabric to hide the under-the-bed mess. When I started sketching out my lil’ codeCAD language a few months ago, I expected to follow the tradCAD conceptual model, but after seeing some of these more specialized workflows, reflecting on the sorts of parts I’ve been making, and (to be honest) being somewhat daunted by the design challenges of the topological naming problem, I’m wondering if I might have more success with something closer to a parametric CSG approach. I made a simple script to map three dials on my$60 MIDI controller to the brightness of my three monitors, so I can easily adjust what I’m focusing on or turn them all off completely when I want to just write at my desk.

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Flatpack Bed