How To Make Chair From Cardboard – About: I am an inventor/creator/designer living in the Bay Area. I work in residential architecture, film set design, animatronics, media art, exhibition design and electronics. I use digital design and production… More about JON-A-TRON »
This lounge chair is made entirely of cardboard! No fasteners, no glued joints, just friction and gaps. Using two and a half sheets of thick 4’x4′ cardboard, a paper template, and a box cutter, you can create this convenient and durable item in a few hours.
How To Make Chair From Cardboard
This project is featured in Asa Christian’s new book, Hands-On Guide: Make Things You Use Every Day, available now on Amazon.
Donttakethisthewrongway Reimagines Cardboard Box As Chair
I chose the dimensions of the Barcelona Pavilion chair as a starting point. Chair design is a very dense subject and I stuck to the pose and dimensions of this chair to focus on experimenting with materials and structure. Also, I find the chair very comfortable. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
After determining the general parameters of the chair, I thought about assembly. Since the cardboard is rigid and flexible, I saw no reason to use glue or fasteners for the seams. I designed the chair hoping that the friction between the parts and the semi-rigidity of the planes would hold everything in place.
After measuring the thickness of the cardboard, I came up with several iterations on the computer before settling on one. I found the last iteration to be better for several reasons. For this project I was inspired by Chairigami, which seems to be how they made their amazing furniture.
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This step includes a Fusion 360 file if you want to make your own design adjustments. It’s free for students and hobbyists and offers plenty of educational support. If you want to learn 3D modeling like I do, I think it is the best choice in the market. Click on the links below to register:
To get a better result, I decided to make my own 3 ply sheets. When I finished the project, I found out that you can buy it like this! Here is a link to it on Uline.
The “template” PDF can be printed to scale and used as a template that can be traced with a box cutter by sticking it to a surface. A DWG file is a CAD file that can be used for laser cutting or any other CNC cutting.
First Day, First Chair.
I used a Metabeam laser cutter for most of this project, but here I show you how to do it by hand. This is totally doable with a straight edge and stencil box cutter, it just takes longer. Here are the steps to do manually.
Cooltepper asked for more information on the crease tool. I haven’t documented this, but the drawing at this point should be pretty clear.
It consists of two parts: a block that you attach to the table, and an arm that turns on a screw that goes through the block.
Goat And Chair
The block consists of three pieces of 3/4″ plywood: one piece 3/4″ X 6″ X 6″ in the middle and two pieces 3/4″ X 6″ X 12″ making up the sides. The slot is for attaching the center arm.
The arm is a piece of 3/4″ plywood about 6″ deep and about 48″ long. The swivel end has an angled cut to keep it from binding the block, and a 45 degree cut along the length of the arm. This cut creates a sharp edge for folding. There is a screw that goes through holes in the block and the arm rotates. 1 I used a /4 inch screw and lock nut to prevent it from loosening.
I used a clamp to secure the block to the workbench and adjusted it so the edge was perfectly flush with the workbench.
Cardboard Chair Instructions
To make the folds even and neat, I used the crease tool shown in the pictures. It’s just 3 pieces of plywood with a slot in the middle and a screw through the top hole to turn the arm into a lever. The arm has a 45º bevel (which I cut on a table saw) to give a nice sharp bend.
I taped it to the table so the edge lay flat on the table top and used it to create folds. This part is very simple and goes very quickly.
Assembly is the easy part! All you have to do is line up the folded surfaces with corresponding gaps and fold them together. Each piece makes it stronger, and when the last one is put in, you have a sturdy chair made of paper!
Furniture Design: Cardboard Chair By Scott Graham At Coroflot.com
The pieces only fit one way and the pleats (obviously) should have cut edges so you can’t screw it up if everything is cut properly. About Me: I am a writer and creator. My current project is Santa’s shop. I’m working on a science fiction book – later. More on @EngineerRigsby MikeTheMaker »
In this tutorial I will show you how to make a cardboard chair. This is from my book Amazing Rubber Band Cars (the chair is actually the seat in a full-sized rubber band car). With cardboard, glue, and patience, you can create a durable (and good-looking, if you’re artistically inclined) chair that will last for years.
I’ve provided a template, but you can make your own if you want to be creative. Note that you will need to cut 76 of these pieces (more if you have a wide back).
Zig Zag Structure
The pieces should be like a template. It is better to rotate the slits, that is, the “grain” of the cardboard should change to each other (“up” in the first piece, “to the right” in the second, “up” in the third piece, “to the right” in the fourth, etc.). If you don’t have a lot of large pieces of paper, you can use small scraps; Make sure that the slots of the adjacent parts overlap (as shown in the picture above (“a”, “b” and “c”).
I’ve had two of these for over four years – keep them dry (like any good piece of furniture) and they’ll serve you well. In this instructable, I will walk you through the process of designing and making a cardboard chair. This project was a design school assignment for me, but it’s a fun and inexpensive design challenge that really got me thinking about how to make chairs.
Corrugated Cardboard: You will need to find suitable sources of cardboard or get creative with the design to fit your cardboard limitations. I was able to make mine using two 8’x4′ sheets of cardboard found at Home Depot and a double layer cardboard box.
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Box Cutter: Just so you know, we cut boxes and stuff. In fact, you can use any knife that is most convenient for you to cut the cardboard.
Use scrap cardboard for this first step. You may need to do this a lot, and you’ll want to save your good quality cardboard for later.
The most important part of any design is the prototyping phase. I actually only spent two hours making the chair for this project, and I learned a lot in those two hours. In the short amount of time I had to do it, the decision-making process was very quick. I decided that the main seat and footprint of my chair would be the trapezoidal shape that my legs form when I’m resting. So, with a friend of similar height to me, I measured the outside angles of his knees to the base of the trapezoid and the width of the bottom of the top of the trapezoid. I did a quick internet search on my phone and found that putting a space between two pieces of cardboard helped improve the texture of the cardboard for architectural models and the like. So I calculated the length of all the sides of the chair and the crossbars that go into the trapezoidal seat, so I had the size of all my cardboard pieces.
Cardboard Chair — Spence Taylor
Within two hours, I started assembling the chair and learned a few things very quickly. First: make sure the corrugation of the cardboard is perpendicular to the floor. I have found that the cardboard will only really hold the weight if the weight is applied perpendicular to the corrugation, otherwise the cardboard will collapse on its own. Remember moving boxes? For this reason, their ribs go straight up and down so that the boxes can be stacked against each other.
Apart from this interesting discovery, the assembly of the prototype went smoothly. I found that only two pages were really needed
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