Sam Holmes Design Blog

I was assigned to build a shelf in my metals class with Bryan Laffitte. I was inspired by the Snug-it furniture line by ecosystems and wanted to do something similar with modularity and a honey comb pattern. I also wanted a design that would be easy to repeat consistently and quickly. The design I developed consists of metal connector joints and wood boards that come together to form a modular system of hexagon cubby shelves. The connectors are cut out of sheet metal and then bent into shape. It was taking a long time to manually bend the pieces and get them to come out consistently so I decided to try to make a die that would do all the bends at once. Getting the die to work properly ended up being a big hassle but in the end I learned a lot of new stuff about die making.

The die took many hours to mill from a very heavy piece of steel.