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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking along the lines of Ikea-style furniture from scratch. Most local hardware stores carry these giant CNC routers, and the technicians there can cut particle board sheets to requirements.

How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.

I definitely would use something like that, instead of trying to cut preexisting furniture to size.

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> Most local hardware stores carry these giant CNC routers, and the technicians there can cut particle board sheets to requirements.

Do you mean local woodshop? CNCs that fit a full sheet-good are very large and expensive and not at your typical hardware store. Especially once they can load and unload, change bits.

Sheet-good sized CNC's are mostly for batch jobs do not really make sense economically for one off designs. You'd be better off with just panel and cabinet saws.

> How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.

This is most modern cabinetry businesses now internally. Some companies have started offering direct to consumer products, but most are still b2b.

In Europe a CNC, or at least good and repeatable saw is available at large hardware stores. You can get any product cut to any shape precisely as long as it's a rectangle. I've not noticed one that offers more than this such as drilling holes.

But even if you were to get the wood cut and prepared perfectly, there's still a lot of skill to turn that into nice desk for example, with good joinery, veneer on exposed end grain, etc and a lot that can go wrong, and you are likely to end up with a worse result than a mass produced desk for a much higher price. This type of manufacturing can't compete at all with the cost optimizations that Ikea can do. So where you see B2C in this space is built-in furniture like for kitchens. This has a limited design space so a lot of the parts are standardized, and the design can be constrained to not have the end user work on details like exposed end grain. I guess this doesn't really have an alternative mass-produced option, so the price comparison is to hiring a contractor, so it makes sense as an offering.

But it's evidently hard to get right. If you go to an Ikea that sells returned goods, that section is filled with kitchen countertops cut to the wrong length (good source of cheap wood for projects by the way).

I live in Europe, never ever seen a CNC in a hardware store.

I ordered my kitchen fronts from such a place, to fit on … an IKEA kitchen. Giving it a different look, but the benefits of standardised units and the IKEA universe. This was customised mass-production, but still about 3x IKEA price point.

Bauhaus has huge saws that they use to cut particle boards. They are not routers so i don't think they would do the cutout for a sink however.

> In Europe a CNC, or at least good and repeatable saw is available at large hardware stores. You can get any product cut to any shape precisely as long as it's a rectangle. I've not noticed one that offers more than this such as drilling holes.

That's not the case in the US.

The big box hardware stores have a large track saw vertically mounted that can cut full sheets of wood, but there usually isn't someone working who is trained to operate it. They also have a rickety cart with a hand saw and tape measure attached with too short cables that you can try to use to make your cuts of dimensional lumber.

Idk, I never cat problems with getting a random Home Depot employee to cut it, the problem is that they are usually very rough cuts, far from square and precision

I see these "In Europe" claims all over hackernews.

You realize "In Europe" doesn't really exist? When you cross a country border, everything is different again.

That would be very expensive compared to ikea.

Look at the very popular Lack table, it's made from cardboard hexagons with four pieces of wood-like thing in the corners to hold the legs. You can't make that yourself for cheap, and just the material cost in eg. wood, would be more expensive than the full table in ikea.

Otherwise, there are many youtube channels specializing in woodworking where you can learn all the basics to design your own furniture, but it won't be cheap.

It depends on your comparison; a Lack table is maybe an extreme example.

I say this because I’m currently working on a project to build a full kitchen’s worth of cabinet carcasses using good quality 19mm plywood, and I’m aiming for it to be cost neutral with Ikea’s kitchen cabinets, having sourced the plywood from a local DIY store. (Obviously ignoring the cost of my existing tools.)

Which is to say, if you could source plywood in volume (therefore cheaper per square meter) and amortise the cost of the CNC machine and other tools over time, I think it would be feasible to be close to cost competitive with IKEA‘s kitchens.

I applaud you and your project.

But CNC isn't the silver bullet. What I ended up with is 25mm glued wood for frames, 55mm for tops and 15mm plywood plus veneer for facades.

If you use 19mm for frames, you won't have enough strength for hinges, which would inevitably be abused.

If you use 19mm for tops, they will sag and vibrate. The best top I have is actually 55mm IKEA glued oak.

I'm not using CNC; I just agree with the previous poster that there's an opportunity. (I'd note that none of your subsequent post related to the comment you made about CNC?)

For my project, I believe 19mm is plenty for carcasses - just about every mass-produced kitchen uses 18/19mm chipboard frames, and they can last for decades, outside of abnormal abuse. The main reason for using the same size is easy compatibility with standard doors/fronts together with standard fitment hinges/runners, all of which I'll be purchasing. The tops will be either granite or concrete.

I don't disagree with there being an opportunity or using CNC, I only point out that pinning everything to materials suitable to widely available CNC is too limiting.

Like, using plywood for verticals is overkill, they don't experience any bending, while 19+19 is 48 so you might as well use glued wood board for example.

People like to complain about it not being solid wood but the furniture from Ikea, such as Lack and Kallax is fit for purpose and remains a low price despite the cost of wood going up a lot. And what you can get at a similar price point from Wal-Mart in North America, or Conforama in Europe, is much much worse quality. Especially the veneer which holds up from Ikea but is more like wallpaper if you spend the same price somewhere else.

Solid wood is also a nightmare to move.

Solid wood is cool in a way of being cool. It's dimensionally unstable to a point is not permitted for cabinetry in some countries. Also it's expensive and it takes a lot of time for a tree to grow to be turned into furniture.

In that regard plywood (or glulam) is still wood that can be laminated and stained/oiled, if one insist on wood.

yeah, those cardboard tables.. I had to glue in 2-4 (5 by 10 cm) stringers and refix legs to them for it to hold a measly epson c8600 and even then it stands on wooden planks to distribute the load.

ikea is a great inspiration for making your own furniture and then a source for bearable spare parts.

Billy bookcases though are just slabs of laminated engineered wood cut to rectangular dimensions, drilled with precision positioned and sized holes, plus a stack of dowels and camlock fasteners.

That seems parameterizable.

>would be very expensive

very doesn't even begin to make it justice.

I've long been considering this idea as I make a lot of my own cabinetry, and would love to get automated cutting and drilling lists depending on if I'll use screws or dowel pins or some nice wooden joints.

In general, you always start with outside dimensions, board thickness, having a kick plate or not (eg. when you make it wheeled), will you chamfer/round the edges and then the rest is simple calculation. You add internal shelve/drawer dimensions and it can consider those too.

I had some scripts that worked with an older version of FreeCAD and printed the cutting list to a CSV, but it still was not the perfect solution.

Interestingly, local chipboard/MDF shops here in Serbia would do that as a service for you on their CNC machines (at additional cost, obviously :)).

I think you’re right, and there’s definitely potential for disruption of kitchen and also wardrobe offerings in some countries.

(I say some countries as IME there’s a huge difference in existing competition between countries. For example, I found that the kitchen options in Germany were hugely restricted vs. what I was used to in the UK.)

If you're interested in that I would search for a maker space or hacker space in your area. They usually have tools (like a CNC router) that would be far too expensive for an individual to buy and they let the public use them after taking a short class and paying a membership fee.

there's an place in Seattle, WA that does this called shelf.me for what looks like zero-hardware self designs.

my shop is next to a cabinet maker who does most of is work in that same birch hard-ply. he's got the full sheet router, but he only really uses it for special projects. its mostly just the big table saw. he's got a subcontractor that just does drawers. most cities have several of his kind of shop, and while they don't have a design website they generally work from napkins. I think that birch ply has gotten really expensive in the last 5 years though.

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