Marc: Every modern household
has a ton of gadgets. And what else do they have? A ton of wall warts, plugs and chargers. Today we're going to build
something to house all that stuff, keep it organized, and make
it look pretty good too. (groovy brass music) What I've got here is my
prototype gadget station that I built about two years ago. It's a nice little
unit, gets the job done, but there's a lot of
improvements that we can make. Before I get into that let me show you some of the things I decided on. The one I modelled this after,
I saw something I believe is called an eNook on the
Internet that was more or less a standing wall-hung unit that
you can fold down the front and put a laptop on there and
type away, have a good time, but also store a bunch of
other things on the inside. That's kind of what I modelled this after. We've got some hinges here that
allow the front to drop down, you have a nice wide work surface.
I added some extra support
here with these chains. We've got enough shelving
units to store a number of gadgets, and you can
see there's holes in the back where you can
feed the cords down. We have plenty of storage inside. On the bottom is another shelf. This is where you store a surge protector. The great thing about
this is if all the plugs are plugged into here you can turn them off when you're not charging everything, and you don't have that
trickle charge that you accumulate over time,
and really it's causing a lot of households to
pay a lot more on their electric bills than they probably should.
You just shut everything
off and it's all done. The key thing is that
you're hiding everything in the bottom in a
compartment that's never seen. All you see is up top, all the gadgets. If you look at the back. Excuse the duct tape, I did
that to hold the wires in place. The wires comes down and
I've got an amount of, about three quarters of
an inch to work with here. The problem with that is a lot of cords won't fit through that hole and be able to go down and into the bottom compartment, which means I have to
take this off of the wall any time I want to add
something new to it.
That is not a good thing, that's definitely
something I want to change. The French cleat that I have
here is a 45 degree angle that hangs on to another
cleat that sits on the wall. That works very well, but we have to figure out a
way to get that French cleat, but also have more space here so that the next unit we'll be able to put those cords in without taking this
piece off of the wall. The overall design, I
think I can do better. I don't even know why I did this. Am I trying to lock Nicole
out of this thing, or what? I think I was just having fun. I put the keys and the
locks on there just because I thought maybe we
might sell this product, and maybe people would want
to lock their stuff in there. The keys are there, what
are you going to do. Interestingly enough,
the unit we're about to build is going to somebody pretty special.
It's Leo Laporte. If you're
not familiar with Leo, Google his name and you'll find plenty
of information about him. He happens to be somebody that Nicole has idolized for years now. And I'll let you in on
a secret, this is just a bribe so that we can meet him in person. Little bit of pressure
because we're making it more high profile than we normally
would with our furniture. He's an all around tech guy who's probably got tons of gadgets,
and is the perfect test subject for a piece of
furniture like this. I can't think of a better person
to give it to. Wish me luck. The first thing I did when
embarking on the design of the second version of this thing
was look at the first one. You can learn a lot when you
have this prototype in hand, and you can see what
worked, what didn't work, what was a good idea, what was a bad idea.
What I did was I opened it up
and I started looking around. Is the depth okay, is the width, the height, is all that acceptable. The number of shelves, do I
need more, do I need less. Is this a good idea, this platform here. In reality, I never even
put a- For a picture I guess I put a laptop
on there to take a photo. Beyond that we never use
this as a laptop surface, and it's probably not the most
practical solution for people. The other thing is, when you put a screw into plywood like I have here, that is really going to put a
lot of strain on that plywood, and eventually this chain
is going to pop right out. Ultimately I want to remove
this whole thing altogether, and just put some doors
on the front, and focus on the fact that this is just
for organizing gadgets, not for putting a computer on here.
Other things, couldn't
we have done better with the cord management than
just drilling some holes. At the back, we talked about
that earlier, giving myself more room so that I can actually
put a cord through here, fish it down and then pull it
into the bottom compartment without removing this
whole thing from the wall. Once you have that functionality
satisfied, you have the shell in your mind of this
feature needs to be here, this is how the shelves
are going to be secured, this is how the whole
case is going to be built.
Then it's a question of decorative things, what do you want it to look like. And this is where there are no rules. As long as you satisfy the
functionality you're free to do whatever you want to
do that makes you happy. At that point you've pretty much got a blank slate, and what do you do? That's usually, I think the
most intimidating part for people is when they have
a blank piece of paper, and they haven't drawn anything yet, and making that first pencil
stroke, and writing down that first idea tends to be
the most challenging part. What I like to do is I like to take some of that pressure off of myself.
There are tons of artists and
woodworkers and builders and things out there who have
done this great work, and all that work is out
there to influence you, and to give you inspiration for
what to do with your project. I think the biggest mistake
a lot of people make, and I've done this too, is thinking that creativity has to be making
something from nothing, you have to make a
completely unique idea that's never been thought of an no one will ever think of it again, and
that's just not true. I think you can look
at a lot of this stuff. I've got Krenov's Impractical
Cabinet Maker here, I've got Box Making Basics,
and Arts and Crafts Furniture, three books that I looked at to give me inspiration for this project. I'm not saying I opened this, said, "That looks good, I'm going
to copy that," of course not.
I saw something, maybe
it's the angle of a leg, maybe it's the way a door is designed, and it excites you, and you say, "Maybe I've going to incorporate
that into my final piece," and you write that idea
down or you draw it. Maybe it comes from my being brought up in a scientific community,
where everything is built upon the work of your predecessors and the people who came before you, that's how it gets to
be as advanced as it is.
I think when it comes
to furniture and design, I don't think there's
anything to be ashamed of. If some great artist made a
great piece, and I can take an element of that and turn it
into something else, and have it blossom into this beautiful
new project, why the heck not. Anyway, that's what I do
and that's where I started. Let me take you through my process, I have a few sketches and things. That's what I recommend doing. Write the stuff down, write down in words if you have to, your ideas. Draw some sketches down, and
it's just pencil and paper, if you don't like it you can erase it.
I'm going to show you the process I took, some of my actual sketches, and I'll show you how I went
from those early sketches, developed the idea in to two
or three different versions, and how I finally arrived
at the final piece. Let's take a look at that. After reading a few books,
the first thing that caught my eye was this Krenov cabinet. I love the way that the
side extends above the top, And the solid wood is carved
to a very nice cove profile. But here's the problem: At
this point I was convinced that the piece needed to
be made out of plywood, so how would I do that carved profile? I started playing with
the thought of applying a substantial block to the
top of the side pieces, and instead of trying to make
it look like one continuous piece I would celebrate the
fact that it was different, maybe even use a
contrasting species of wood.
I went so far as to draw out the
front view, and the top view, but in the end I just couldn't
wrap my head around it. This next design definitely has
more of a Japanese influence. The edges at the top would
be carved to a thin upturn, and the base would be
given a significant cove. You could see that the side
has a pattern routed into it that would allow for increased
air flow into the cabinet. The front doors feature an unusual
rail and stile arrangement, and ultimately this whole
design just didn't excite me. I was afraid that the
top would be too fragile, and the piece was just a bit too much of a foreign architecture statement. The next thing I did was look through the FineWoodworking.com gallery.
I came across this
piece by Richard Kautto. What struck me the most about
this piece was the legs. I just love the way that
they stand proud above the bottom and the top of the
case, and the curvature on the outside would give
me a lot of cool options. The question is, how to incorporate that concept into my cabinet? And here's what I came up with. You notice that the doors are right off my last concept drawing, I did like those. A design like this gives me
lots of options for details, but before I get too far ahead of myself I had to consider some
basic construction issues. For instance, how would
I hide the plywood edges? The solution for that was
to just use solid wood. The main box itself can be
assembled much like a drawer, with dovetails or finger
joints at the corners.
The top and bottom pieces
would be notched to allow for the legs, and the sides
would be joined to the legs so that they meet flush
on the inside of the case. The reason for the notch
is to bring the top and bottom of the case out
far enough to accommodate inset doors, and perhaps
even knife hinges. The back panel would be assembled out of several individual pieces.
Each piece would support a
shelf, and leave a little space above it for
passing the cords through. After a few hours of hacking my way through SketchUp, I came up with this. I still have lots of details to work out, like the top of the legs, and most of the curves aren't exactly what I want, but it's close enough. Notice how in the back, the legs only have a curve cut into the side, because the back needs to
sit flush against the wall. The bottom line here is that
all proportions are worked out, and I have enough information
to place an order for the wood. All and all, it took about
three days to design this piece. You might be wondering why so long.
Well, it wasn't exactly three
days of drawing and sketching, much of the time was
spent just letting the concept drawing simply exist for a while. A lot of times the design
that looks awesome the minute that I draw it holds a lot
less appeal the following day. Now here's the coolest
part about this project: I want to invite you guys
to build along with me. I don't want you to build the
same exact cabinet because, really mine's not even done
yet, and the video is going to lag behind real time, so that's
not really going to work. I think on the end table project I tried getting some feedback, but the problem was by the
time the video was out, I had already gone
several steps beyond that point and I couldn't
incorporate anybody's ideas.
In this case I'm not asking
for feedback on mine, necessarily, I want to see
what you guys are doing and how you solve these problems,
and we can have a forum of exchanging ideas on how
to tackle these challenges. Then also I can't wait to see what you goes come up with to turn
what is a simple design and a simple box into something
beautiful, ornate, whatever your tastes are and whatever matches the dĂŠcor of your home. The bottom line is, I
think all of us could probably use a gadget
station in our house, but the idea is not to
make it look techie.
You don't want to make it look
like a piece of electronics, it's a piece of furniture, and no one even knows what's inside those doors until you open it and go, "Woah,
that is really cool." Let's review some of the challenges that you're going to confront here. First of all, the inside of this unit is going to be subject to a lot of heat. All of these electronics
are going to produce heat, and the cords and the wall
warts and things in the bottom, those are going to generate heat, so you have to figure out a
way to have good air exchange.
I dropped the ball when I
designed this one, because there's just a few holes in the
back, that's just not enough. My second design will
incorporate something that allows more air to get into the unit. The other thing we want to be concerned with is cord management. The cords go through here,
they feed down to the bottom, but it's a lot more than that. You've got to figure out
how much room to allow yourself so that most
cords can go through and fall down without taking
the unit off the wall, and you've got to come
up with some system. Holes like this is okay but
I think I can probably come up with something better
that disguises the cords a little bit more so it's
not as much of an eye sore.
The other thing is you
want to keep the general organization of the entire inside in mind. There's a lot of different
electronics, and depending on what you plan on storing
in here that's going to determine whether this thing
needs to be more shallow, whether it needs to be
wider, taller, whatever. You also want to make sure that you don't lock yourself down to a particular design. Let's say this is your
favorite camera right now. Well don't design a cradle that
holds that camera perfectly, because in five years that may not be your favorite camera any more. You want it to grow with
you as your electronics, and you know what, by nature
these things are meant to be upgraded, so you're
going to go through them a lot over the course of your lifetime, so it's nice to have something
that can grow with you.
And overall, it just needs to look good. You need to take something simple and turn it into something beautiful. Sometimes there's beauty in simplicity, so don't be afraid of doing that either. I hope you'll build one along with us, let's keep in touch, let's
communicate back and forth. If you don't have a blog of your own to display the pictures,
just send them to me. I would love to post them
on the website and show everybody the progress
that you've made so far. So good luck, and I can't wait to see what you guys come up with. Thanks for watching. (bright blues music).