Woodworking Digression

For some reason I decided to build laptop stands (kiosks?) for our booth at the conventions. 

SPOILER!

The idea was we would have our game playable on laptops, and anyone could walk up to the kiosk and play. The kiosk should be in-theme with our game, light but sturdy, and collapse down for transportation, including on a plane, to another convention. So it also needs to be really easy to take apart and put back together.

Design Requirements:

• Hold a laptop at bar height, not fall over
• In theme - made of wood, organic curves
• Easy to set up and tear down
• Fit into luggage that can fly on a plane

Anyway I couldn't find a product that did all this, so I decided to make it. Once you're making something yourself, you can add in some stretch goals:

Stretch Goals:

• Looks totally unique
• Branded to our game
• Stretches my personal woodworking abilities, but not too far
• Have to buy at least one new tool in order to complete the project <_<

So, here's the rough design I came up with.

It's designed to go together with 8 attachment points per side for 16 altogether, using through bolts and some T-nuts maybe, and some screws maybe. This seemed like it might basically work, so I moved on to the next phase.

I made a prototype. 

Along the way I simplified the hardware by thinking about how Ikea furniture works. Basically, you can embed bolts, or nuts, into the wood itself, then you don't need screws, and you don't need to manage nuts and bolts, just bolts, which is faster to assemble, and won't strip the wood if you take it apart multiple times. 

The final design calls for 12 bolts, in 1 style and 2 lengths. I'm pretty happy with that. The other thing I ran into was that it was devilishly hard to make an accurate and square cut in a 1x12 using a cheap circular saw. Each kiosk calls for 8+ such cuts, and we're making 2 kiosks, so I felt that basically justified this purchase:

Anyway it's pretty affordable for this category of saw. But I had to square the table myself? Weird. Whatever I love it.

The main fancy part of these kiosks are the curves I wanted to build in to the sides. These keep the design nice and light for traveling, and they look awesome too. Once I got the curves drawn the way I wanted them, I used a jigsaw to very carefully cut the first piece, and a router to touch it up. Then, for the other three pieces (2 kiosks x 2 sides each = 4 sides) I was able to just rough cut with the jigsaw, and make an exact copy with this following bit. I had never done this successfully before (last time I tried I ruined the bit almost instantly by plunging it through several feet of cedar.).

Yeah, then, some more jigsaw work, some more router work, and some sanding, and that's about it for the woodworking.

Annie used a soldering iron to burn our logo into the mid-plate (the logo plate also serves a crucial structural purpose).  And there we have it. 

They also break down flat for packing.

Ah, the joys of being an indie game developer :-D