Viesor Labs

Once upon a time I wanted to make a surprise for my girlfriend who had been far away for a while and finally was coming back to be with me. Being a sentimental person, I wanted to give her something special that she would remember for a long time and something that could be actually useful.

Right away a thought came across my mind that reflected an inconvenience that I had myself experienced plenty of times. This inconvenience was a lack of a bed table or, like most of people call it, bed tray in our apartment. What a selfish person am I ? Anyways, decision had been made.

I started with a sketch that I drew in a 3D CAD software. Probably CAD package was an overkill and for someone may not be available due to high price. However, there are some packages that are available for private use at an affordable cost. Anyway, the advantages are apparent - first, the ability to simply visualize the final product, second, think through the manufacturing process at early stage, and, third, generate drawings for various parts of your work.

Before I got to drawing the model I made some basic measurements of myself sitting on a bed and came out with some hight, depth, and width values. If someone tries to repeat this, make sure you seat on a soft bed so you account for your body sinking into a soft material.  Otherwise you may end up with a table legs of which are too short.

What design to choose? It is completely up to you and here you are limited only to your imagination and, obviously, some common sense. Here is what I came out with.

Next was manufacturing of an actual table.

Due to availability and good mechanical properties I chose plywood as a building material. Obviously, it might be way nicer if I used a real wood for the same purpose. The fact that you should be aware of when you are building something out of plywood is the ugly pattern that can be seen in the cut due the layered structure. Fortunately, this could be easily hidden at the final building stage by using an adhesive trim that is usually available from hardware stores. Another problem could arise from a different wood pattern on top and bottom sides or different sheets of plywood. To fight this problem just try using the same sheet for most of visible parts of your creation.

Using the generated by CAD package mechanical drawings I cut out all the pieces of my puzzle using a table bend saw. Sanded them so they would look as nice as I needed, drilled all the necessary holes and prepared dowels and glue. Using glue is important in wood working otherwise whatever you are building will become loose very fast - take IKEA furniture that you assemble yourself. Screws or nails are never enough, but, dowels and glue might be quite enough, especially, for small projects like this one. I used dowels to mount the table legs to the top plate - created blind holes in table top and through holes in the legs.

After gluing things together this is what I had.

Now it was time to hide the ugly table top edge by gluing a wooden trim around the edge. Typically it’s done by applying pressure with a hot object to the trim placed on the edge, iron will do. I did not repeat the same operation for the table legs because I found this layered pattern there quite original.

Next was wood staining. I just chose a color I liked and followed the instructions on the can. One trick, try how the stain looks on a spare piece of the same wood that you are using for you project first! Different woods can produce quite different result with the same wood stain.

After staining was finished I found my table quite boring and plain. Thus, I decided to add some art on the top of the table. Found several old maps somewhere on the Internet, desaturated colors and printed in black and white. Unfortunately, they did not give me any good impression as they were. That is why I tried to soak them in the wood stain that I used for wood coloring. Guess what? I worked pretty fine - the maps started looking like they were 100 year old maps. Even the paper texture changed and became more thick.

Several more coatings and my surprise/gift was completed.

Worked out pretty well for serving breakfast or being used as a laptop support.

Tags: bed table, bed tray, wood working