The mortises were cut into the legs using a forstner bit and bench chisel. The legs were flattened on the jointer, squared up, cut on the table saw, and then ran through the finish planer to become perfectly square on all sides. I figured I could easily fill any large gaps with epoxy later down the road if necessary. Suffice to say I had to cut around a lot of waste and still had knots and worm holes present. I was able to get a couple of pieces matched up that I liked for the legs and I was able to extract the right pieces for the top, rails, stiles, and door components. This is tricky with black walnut since it has the tendency to have a large spectrum of colors between the dark heartwood and extremely light and creamy sap wood. Since most of the stock was in the 4/4 to 5/4 range I knew that I would have to laminate the wood together to make the legs for the sideboard. There were a fair amount of worm holes, checks, cracks, wane, and knots to work around. I only had 4/4, 5/4, and 6/4 stock to work with from the lumber I received and the biggest problem I ran into was that the lumber had a fair amount of insect damage (35 year old insect damage). My mother in-law worked out a deal to get me the lumber (along with similarly aged cherry) delivered for a trade. The stock I had to build the sideboard came from a VERY old walnut logged that was milled up over 35 years ago in central NY. You can pull the exact dimensions of each part for the entire sideboard if you are interested in building something similar to this. You can access each part in the assembly by using the public link provided here. The beauty of using software such as Fusion360 to design a piece of furniture is that it gives you an idea of the proportions, scale, and overall appearance of a piece prior to making your first cut. The video shows you how the joints work and how each piece mates up with the others. legs, side rails, door stiles) while others had a one time use (i.e. Some parts were able to be used multiple times in the Fusion360 assembly (i.e. I edited the appearance of the parts to appear as I would hope they would look after building the actual sideboard and finishing it. I made each part separately and then joined them together in an assembly. This way I was able to pull direct measurements from each piece I designed in Fusion360. My sideboard was designed with the exact dimensions and joinery types I planned on using when I physically built the piece of furniture. This way my students could see what is possible with this form of 3D rendering. When it came to designing my own piece of furniture I used all of the skills I was currently teaching my students so that they could see the direct application of those specific techniques, joints, and processes. Their challenge was to design a piece of furniture that similarly solved a specific problem. Therefore the piece was built to spec to fit in a specific area and complete a specific task. I told them that the reason I was designing it was to solve a specific problem. I designed my piece of furniture prior to teaching my students about furniture design so that I could use my design as a model / example. I thought that this would be a cool thing to share with the Instructables community and hope you find it both inspirational and educational. Along the way I am going to tell you about the process I used to teach this to high school students. With this instructable I am going to go through the steps I followed to design a piece of furniture using Fusion360 and then the process I followed to actually build the final piece of furniture. If you are a teacher and you are interested in a project such as this please don't hesitate to check out this link for all of the details on what I did. "Well hey!" I thought, "There is the project I was looking for!" I decided that I would bring some of my woodworking prowess into my CAD classroom and challenge my students with designing a piece of furniture of their choosing. My wife and I had just done a bit of reorganizing in our house and she mentioned in passing that it would be really nice to have a sideboard to put along our stairway. I was thinking that there has to be a great project waiting around the corner that would be extremely real-world applicable and would involve the skills I had recently taught my students. Recently we were working with both Fusion360 and SolidWorks doing some basic 3D rendering making gears, car rims, and some other basic shapes and designs. I teach high school engineering design and one of the classes I teach is called Engineering and Architectural Design.
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