I'm making a record album cabinet that will be shipped several hundred miles to the customer. To ship it fully assembled would cost over $200, but if it can ship flat pack the cost is only about $50, so there was motivation to design it such that it can be shipped flat and easily assembled by the customer, and without sacrificing strength. Using knockdown fittings and dowel locators is not that easily done by hand, but lends itself perfectly to what a CNC does best.

I cut all the components in the conventional way, then used the CNC to cut the dowel holes, KD fittings holes, and also some jigs that I needed for drilling the holes in the ends of parts that couldn't be mounted on the CNC. Here's a photo of one of the shelves showing the dowel holes and screw pilot holes. Not shown are the KD barrel nut mortises on the bottom. The shelves were two sided jobs.



The ends of the shelves have both dowel holes and holes for the knockdown fittings. I made a jig to aid in boring them.



A little jig was made for boring holes in the tops and bottoms of the partitions for the dowel locators. Another jig, not shown, was used to bore the holes in the tops of the side frames for dowels and KD fittings.




Here's a photo showing the KD fittings used to hold the top on and for bolting the side frame to the shelves.



Some of the parts ready to assemble.



And after assembly, minus those oh so attractive hairpin legs yet to be added.



Just about ready for finishing with Osmo Polyox.

The CNC is a tool that has made it easier for me to build projects that otherwise would have been a lot more tedious. The downside is the time it takes to create the drawings and toolpaths makes one-off work less efficient than doing it by hand. Multiples, however, is where the CNC really shines. So I just need to get some additional orders for this.

John