A bit of background
I’m English, but have been living in Finland since 2013 when I arrived in snow storms and -26°C to work on a big construction project in Hamina. I had been seconded as resident Structural Engineer and quickly made myself useful by finding solutions to tricky problems.
Structural Engineering is a super interesting and very respectable profession, but somehow I felt the need for change and wanted to work for myself, on my own terms. So after 8 months in Hamina, I moved with my girlfriend Natalia to Helsinki.
We moved into a 1920’s apartment block in Kallio (the coolest neighbourhood in Helsinki, with the highest Hipster population) and started to turn it into our home. After a few weeks of picnicking on our living room floor at mealtimes, we decided that we were in need of a kitchen table. I didn’t want to do the obvious (boring) thing and buy one from Ikea - I wanted to make my own!
Table Time
I made a quick search and came across Aalto Fablab, so went along to the next public open day. I met the Fablab team, Anu and Ali, and chatted with them about my plan to make a kitchen table. I quickly realised that I needed to know a lot more about CNC milling before I could make the table a reality, so first I made a small prototype with the lasercutter.
3D-Model, made with Fusion 360
A mini version of the kitchen table with cubebots looking on
Once I had made the protoype, I was hooked! I made weekly trips to the Fablab to learn to work with the CNC router. Next, I planned the cuts for producing the parts of the table, and at that point it dawned on me…
My design was going to eat up an enormous amount of material! Mainly because I stubbornly wanted to expose the layered edge of plywood on the table top. In essence, I would to be taking a perfectly good sheet of material, cutting it up into little bits (and making lots of waste in the process), then gluing it back into a sheet again!
Not the smartest idea ever!!!
In the end, Natalia’s grandmother gave us her old table for our kitchen, so I made an opensource coffee table instead (I opted for the Edie Table from Opendesk). It turned out to be quite a complex job, because I had to adapt the design files to suit the thinner 12mm ply the Lab had available.
Edie Table from Opendesk on the router table
The end result was pretty good, if a little wonky in places, but it means much more to me than an Ikea table ever could - because I made it myself!
Foot in the Door
Anu and Ali soon picked up on my enthusiasm for CNC and asked me to help out in the Lab part time. I took the opportunity to learn more, and by September 2014, I was full time in the Lab and getting to grips with the other digital fabrication tools.
As of January 2016, I became the only member of staff in Aalto Fablab, at a time when the Lab is busier than ever. My own projects have dropped to second priority, but I’m hoping that Fab Academy will give me a good excuse to work on a meaningful project and a chance to finally take some time to get into electronics beyond writing arduino code!
Summing Up
If you’ve come this far, thanks for sticking around - I salute you!
This may have seemed like a bit of a tangent, but I hope it illustrates a simple idea that I take very seriously and believe to be very powerful:
Many things in this world are the way they are because someone made it that way. And if you don’t like it, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be the one to change it and make it better…
That’s all from me, but just in case you still need convincing - here’s a little song from Honda “For anyone who’s ever hated. In the key of grrrrrr.”