‘Balance’ Coffee Table

Here’s a summary of my coffee table project that many of you have seen me work on (or struggle with) over for the last several months.

DCIM138GOPRO

I like furniture that can flex or modify it’s position to address different needs. I’ve seen coffee tables that raise to eating height before, but I wanted to design one that really expresses the mechanism and plays up the physics behind it. Back in October I made a 1/2 scale mock up of the design to understand the motion.

BCT-MOCKUP

Then it was back to designing a full size mock-up.

MOCK-UP-FULL

 

I realized it wasn’t going to be stable enough with just one set of arms, so I decided two sets would still look good. Everything was designed in Autodesk Revit. The software allows you to figure out volume, then with a given density of materials I could get weights from the various parts. This allowed me to determine the balance. I didn’t want it to be perfectly balanced with the counter-weight, but have enough weight to assist the movement.

COFFEE TABLE BALANCE-v2 side     CTB REVIT

First I started making the frame out of aluminum. It’s fastened using a pneumatic riveter.

FRAME-01FRAME-02

Painting the steel arms.

ARMS

CNC cutting the concrete forms out of pink foam

FOAM-01 FOAM-02

FOAM-03

Creating the concrete counter-weight form

counterwight-01

Failed attempt to CNC cut aluminum for brackets. I’ll skip the rest of these struggles…

counterweight-02

Casting the concrete base

casting-01

Casting the counterweight (nice and sloppy)

casting-02

The base assembled.

casting-03

casting-04

casting with arms

Frame is attached.

assembled-01

There were many tweaks after testing it. There was some wiggling around the axles, so I widened the holes in the steel arms to put nylon sleeve bearings in for a tighter smoother fit. There was still some shifting after putting some weight on the front, so I designed a locking mechanism with a latch.

CTB LATCH

Lots of struggle with this latch at the top of the photo. (FYI, learn the cold metals milling machine if you need a part like this)

locking mech

And finally… a video…

By Josh Myers

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