I once thought I was clever!
When I started out I just used my new ShopBot to cut boat parts and boat related things. Boats were what I did. But after a while the Law of the Instrument started to rear its ugly head…
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
I began to think about other things that I could do with this amazing machine. I needed a cabinet to hold and organize the computer paraphernalia to run my ShopBot, so why not design and build something. It needed to support the bulky CRT monitors of the day, with a drawer for a keyboard and mouse and storage for all the other debris. Of course plywood was the natural choice for material since I used it at work every day.
It would have been easy to build some variation of kitchen cabinets, held together with glue and hardware, but I thought I was clever and would build a workstation without any glue or hardware. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so I started working on a “workstation”.
I called the connection method I came up with SnapLok, because it used hooks and the natural springiness of plywood to “snap” the parts together. Tabs on the drawer fit in slots on the sides to eliminate hardware slides, and with all the parts sized for the thickness of plywood I had it was sturdy and easy to assemble. I reveled in my cleverness!
I was sure I was on the cusp of revolutionizing the furniture industry, but figured I needed to make some more pieces using that system. The ShopBot offices needed a smaller cabinet with doors for their coffee pot and I needed a cabinet I could hang on the wall to store supplies. The “Coffee Cabinet” was born.
But wait…there was more. In true hammer/nail fashion I next made sawhorses that folded, a couple styles of shelving, and tried turning the slots and fingers sideways to make boxes that could be assembled and dis-assembled without tools.
Before I had a chance to call IKEA though and tell them to throw away all their hardware though I discovered a couple of “issues” with style of no-hardware furniture. The hooked fingers could break after a bunch of cycles being assembled and dis-assembled, and if you made the hooked fingers strong enough to survive they became too stiff to be easy to dis-assemble. It was an issue, but one that I could live with.
The big issue was that plywood is a surprisingly imprecise material and these joints require knowing pretty accurately how thick the particular sheet of plywood you were using was so that the slots and tabs worked together. Each file had to be customized to the material you had. There could be a little slop, but too much made it a bit wobbly and too little require a pretty large hammer to assemble!
In true ShopBot fashion I made files available for the workstation and coffee cabinet, and lots of them were made. I also released a set of files for creating the SnapLok joint that I called “Open Source Joinery” to encourage others that were cleverer than I was to explore the system and maybe solve some of the problems.
I still enjoy seeing them in shops I visit, but have a little twinge of regret that I didn’t just add a couple of screws or bolts to the design!
If you want to learn WAY more than you ever wanted to know about my struggles with plywood, read My Love Hate Relationship with Plywood here on Medium.
Read more of about my 20+ years in CNC fabrication in https://medium.com/make-it-your-own-d-mn-self
