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Impressive Shop Jiggery for Cutting a Molding Profile Into an Arched Workpiece

Rain Noe

Doorways and windows with curved architraves present a challenge for fabricators. How do you cut the molding profile along the curve?

Australian firm McKay Joinery solves this with an impressive jig that they fit over their shaper:

It's hard to believe that prior to industrialization, this was done by hand, using carving gouges.

Smart Design for a Hose Reel with a Guide Ring

Rain Noe

This stainless steel garden hose and reel is by Hataya, a Japanese company that specializes in making reels.

Though the internal hose is vinyl, the cladding is stainless steel, which prevents UV from breaking the vinyl down over time. But perhaps the most clever feature of the reel is the little captured guide ring encircling the hose.

This ring rides between two tracks, and prevents the hose from getting kinked or winding unevenly as you retract it:

Sadly, it's not available in the 'States.

Dunnage Bags: How the Pros Keep Cargo from Shifting

Rain Noe

To secure cargo, shippers can use bracing and straps. Those require connection points, and take time to install. A far faster method is to use what are called dunnage bags. These come in different sizes and are essentially giant balloons, placed between objects and filled on-the-spot with compressed air.

They prevent contents from shifting, are great for filling voids between irregular-shaped objects, and add practically nothing to the overall shipping weight.

Image: Astrid Groeneveld, CC BY-SA 3.0

They're not just for large shipping organizations. Furnituremaker Matt Weber uses them to protect his creations during delivery:

Dunnage bags are sold everywhere from Amazon to Uline.

Industrial Designer Develops Unusual Wooden Connectors for Flatpack Furniture (Part 2)

Rain Noe

Last year we spied a teaser video from industrial designer Michael Mahle. As a student at Bauhaus University, Mahle had developed an all-wooden system of connectors for flatpack furniture. No metal, and no glue are required.

Now Mahle's company, nurholz, is up-and-running in Germany. Here's a better look at his novel connection system:

PURE WOOD THROUGH DIGITAL MANUFACTURING.

nurholz combines traditional woodworking with modern manufacturing. Our patented glue- and metal-free wood joints allows for individually adaptable, expandable, and repairable furniture construction.

nurholz focuses on eco-effectiveness with the aim of a consistent circular economy.

The company recently completed their first large order: Ten folding benches and five folding tables for a café in Dettenhausen, Germany.

Mahle is in the process of securing a patent.

An Argument for Privacy Stamps Over Paper Shredders

Rain Noe

We think of 21st-century objects as being hi-tech. But here's a low-tech one that's growing in popularity, thanks to the rise of identity theft: Privacy stamps. Invented in the 2000s, they use ink cartridges to roll gobbledygook over printed text, obscuring it.

In an age of paper shredders, privacy stamps might be seen as extraneous objects. But they have several advantages. One, they can be used to obscure text on objects that you can't easily throw into a shredder.

Two, they take up little space and require no nearby outlet, unlike a paper shredder.

Three is that they assist with paper recycling. While shredded paper is technically recyclable, it requires specialized facilities that are rare; in practice, you'll have a devil of a time finding one. Also, the fibers in shredded paper are much shorter, giving them less recycling life. Privacy stamps allow you to keep sheets of paper intact, meaning they can be recycled roughly five to seven times before the fibers become too short.

Of course, nothing beats shredders for bulk work, which is why corporations and offices will continue to use them. But for individuals and families, privacy stamps are a little better for the environment, if you don't mind putting in the elbow grease.

Portable Dual 24" Monitors in Rolling Carry-On Form is Now a Reality

Rain Noe

It was two years ago that we first heard about Base Case, a startup that claimed to have wedged two 24" monitors into a rolling carry-on form factor. Back then it was just teaser images. But now the product's come to market, targeting traveling creatives and spreadsheet crunchers.

The system weighs 23 lbs, and sets up/breaks down in less than a minute. It's both Mac and Windows compatible.

One thing to note is that the units don't have their own power, so for truly remote use, you'd need a portable battery than can provide 180W per hour.

The company doesn't recommend you check these—they're still relatively fragile monitors, after all—and has designed these to fit into overhead bins. That said, they technically exceed the maximum length by a smidge (these are 22.75" tall; the airlines like 22"), so how well your travels go will depend on how officious your flight attendants are.

The units retail for $3,000.

Inside the Design of Craighill's Wonderful Metrolog Ruler

Rain Noe

I'm really impressed with Brooklyn-based Craighill's focus on what I'll call pure industrial design. The firm has an uncanny ability to lock in on the actual user experience, including offline considerations, while confidently jettisoning the traditional ways those problems have been clumsily solved. They're not afraid to develop entirely new forms that solve problems in new ways, and their products meet a high visual style standard to boot.

A great case in point is their Metrolog Ruler, designed as a tableside replacement of the beam caliper, while providing standard ruler functionality. (It doesn't have the reach of the beam caliper's jaws—you won't be taking the diameter of a thick dowel or rod, for instance—but it does mean you don't have a small, sharp tomahawk on your desk.)

"The ideal measuring device for us didn't exist," explains firm founder Hunter Craighill, "so we designed a new one." Here he explains their inspiration and problem-solving approach:

Industrial Design Firm's Refillable Metal Floss Tool Lands $425K on Kickstarter

Rain Noe

This Flossr object, by Swedish industrial design firm SNRGY Studios, is a metal floss tool that's refillable.

The idea is that rather than buying floss in plastic dispensers, or those one-off picks, you buy bare spools. (Within the sustainable-goods ecosystem, companies now exist that sell floss refills with paper cores.)

There is a bit of effort involved. In order to use the tool, you need to first wind your floss onto the included silicone spool. This spool resembles a sewing machine bobbin.

Once you've loaded it, you pop it onto the handle, then "thread" the tool, again rather like a sewing machine.

A full spool provides "months of daily use per refill," the firm says.

The business end of the tool folds into the handle, like a switchblade, for transit.

SNRGY clearly struck a nerve in the market: At press time they'd landed over $425,000 in pledges, with 15 days left to pledge. The tool is going for $37 and should ship in January of next year.

From Guinness Book of World Records to Custom Machines

Heather Miller

Nikolas Weinstein Studios' sculptures are immediately recognizable. Often composed of thousands of glass tubes, they are defined by fluidity and inspired by the architectural spaces they inhabit. That vision recently earned them a Guinness Book of World Records title for Mangrove, the world's largest glass tube installation. Soaring eight stories throughout the Solaire Resort atrium in Manila, Philippines, the sculpture weighs more than 13 metric tons and contains more than 16,000 individual glass tubes, all cut and woven by hand.

The eight-story Mangrove glass tube installation in the Solaire Resort.

Inspired by the atrium light shining down from above and the root system of the mangrove tree, Weinstein didn't set out to break records. He simply wanted visitors to become part of the sculpture itself.

"The idea became environmental," Weinstein says. "Instead of just looking at something in the middle of the space, like a piece on a podium, I was really interested in making something where you could move through it, above it, and around it. Even with all the modeling and preparation, the first time you see it upends expectation. It's a beast."

That sense of immersion and scale has defined Weinstein's work for decades. Over the past 27 years, he has created sculptural installations for public buildings and private homes around the world. Even though the sculptures are hand-crafted, Weinstein has always been an early and enthusiastic technology adopter. Today, Autodesk Fusion plays a central role in bringing those visions to life.

Weinstein first encountered glass after college while working at a stained-glass company in Brooklyn. That rigid approach was a far cry from the fluid sculptural forms he would eventually create, but the experience sparked a fascination with glass that stayed with him.

A turning point came when renowned architect Frank Gehry encountered one of Weinstein's sculptural pieces and invited him to collaborate. The relationship proved formative, not only because of Gehry's stature, but because of the trust he extended to a young, relatively untested glass artist.

"I lucked out," Weinstein says. "He gave me a tremendous amount of latitude, and it was, to say the least, both rewarding and harrowing."

Connecting art and engineering with Fusion

Fusion now sits at the center of Nikolas Weinstein Studios' workflow. While the organic glass forms often originate with sketches and then move into Rhino 3D, anything that must meet physical reality—dimensions, tolerances, hardware, fabrication constraints, and structural requirements—goes into Fusion.

"As soon as that organic shape needs to meet a hard reality, we move into Fusion," says Jonah Burns, manufacturing engineer, Nikolas Weinstein Studios. "It becomes real there."

For Weinstein and his team, Fusion acts as a hub where design, engineering, and manufacturing all come together.

"Fusion acts as a hub where we can do 'a little of everything,' whether it's CAD, CAM, sheet metal design, FEA, or material calculations all in the same model," Weinstein says. "I firmly believe that the people who are designing things should be the ones making them. With Fusion, we're able to do that."

That workflow became especially critical during the development of Mangrove. The studio collaborated closely with global engineering firm Arup to validate the sculpture's structural systems and custom hardware. Fusion enabled the teams to rapidly iterate on cable tensioning components, test them, and refine them in near real time.

"We could easily work with our structural engineers at Arup, and within hours—not days or weeks—we'd redesign a component, print or machine it, physically test it, run FEA analysis, and send updated proposals back," Burns says. "Sometimes we'd go through multiple iterations before lunch."

Fusion also enabled seamless collaboration between the studio's New York and San Francisco operations.

"I'd design something in New York, and someone in our San Francisco shop could immediately open it, switch to the CAM workspace, and cut it on the CNC there," Burns says. "San Francisco has welding and metalworking capabilities we don't have in New York, so we could instantly distribute work geographically while staying synchronized."

For Mangrove, the team even developed a parametric welding jig generator to automate fixture creation for the sculpture's many unique geometries.

"For Mangrove, we built a parametric welding jig generator where we could take two angles (clocking and lean), and Fusion would produce a unique, labeled fixture," Burns says. "What would have been 53 tedious custom designs boiled down to 'tweaking a lowest common parametric denominator.'"

Designing custom tools and machines

The same mindset that drove Mangrove also pushed the studio to rethink its entire fabrication process. Over time, Fusion has evolved from a design tool into the platform the team uses to create the machines that manufacture the sculptures.

"We're at this moment where everything is coming together," Weinstein says. "With Fusion, we have the freedom to design and make anything we really want or need."

One example is a custom-built kiln that is now central to the studio's glass shaping process. The kiln is used to heat-form or "slump" straight glass tubes into controlled curves using custom molds for Weinstein's woven sculptures. As the glass softens over several hours, the tubes gradually bend to conform to the mold and develop the precise curvature needed for each installation.

Because the studio is located in a historic New York building, the kiln had to be designed as a sectional system that could be hoisted piece by piece to a second-floor workspace and assembled on site. Fusion enabled the team to coordinate the structure, electrical systems, and fabrication constraints within a single parametric model, ensuring every component fits both the space and the manufacturing process.

The team has also designed and built several custom fabrication machines tailored specifically to its glass weaving techniques. One of these is a glass-grooving machine that dynamically and equally spaces precise circular indentations into glass tubes. The grooves create channels for stainless-steel crossweave cables so they can't slide during assembly.

"The entire thing was made in Fusion, and it's now integral to our whole process," Burns says.

Two additional machines function almost like a loom. One automates the threading of continuous cable through hundreds of glass tubes, while another manages cross-weaving and twists cables into grooves with carefully controlled tension and spacing.

"No one else is going to want these machines or even try to make them," Weinstein says. "They're perfectly built for the kind of crazy things that only we would want to do. Fusion allows us this freedom to design the machines and solutions we really need."

That ability to rapidly design, prototype, and manufacture custom systems has fundamentally changed how the studio works.

"In just the last five years, we've completely reinvented how we iterate," Weinstein says. "Fusion allows us to imagine a machine that incorporates off-the-shelf parts with custom machined assemblies. Now we can make unicorn machines that do just what we want really quickly. It's a dream that opens doors to a different way of working."

See everything Autodesk Fusion has to offer with a free 30-day trial.

Form Follows Function: Gustaf Westman's Chunky Coffee Maker

Rain Noe

This startling ceramic object is actually a drip coffeemaker.

With a glossy, tactile appeal, it speaks of low tech and high craft at the same time. It's also pretty form-follows-function: If the thick ceramic cylinders are the predetermined source material, you pretty much can't imagine this being shaped any other way.

It's by Swedish designer Gustaf Westman, the latest addition to his Chunky line of ceramic cups, saucers and vessels. These are all handmade in Portugal, and no two are alike.

The Chunky Coffee Maker will be available for pre-order on May 24th.

An Artist/Designer's Sick NYC Apartment, Renovated from Maid's Quarters in The Dakota

Rain Noe

Located at 72nd Street and Central Park West, the Dakota is the oldest luxury apartment building in New York City. The German Renaissance structure, which dates to the 1880s, was designed for a time when the wealthy had servants. They lived in the undesirable parts of the gables, up six or more flights of stairs.

Image: Ajay Suresh, CC BY 2.0

In the 1960s, artist and furniture designer Ward Bennett purchased several of these maid's rooms, and renovated it into his own duplex apartment and studio.

Ungainly protrusions for mechanical workings housed in the gable were artfully concealed.

A flagpole running through the space and up to the roof was used to support a circular tabletop.

The space, which was continuously revamped up until the 1980s, contained furniture of Bennett's own design as well as artifacts gathered during his travels.

The space also gave Bennett access to something most New Yorkers would kill for: A rooftop terrace with a view of Central Park.

Bennett passed away in 2003 at the age of 85. There's no word on who the apartment went to.

Library Tables Meant to Accommodate Coffee

Rain Noe

The Kadoma City Library, outside of Osaka, Japan, was designed with a café-like vibe. The library's concept is "enjoying reading with coffee."

Because beverages and books don't always go together, furniture designer Tatsuki Kokubo designed these for the space, minimizing the chance of accidents:

Whether by design or serendipity, the two-cup versions bear a resemblance to local nature:

The two-cup-holder version, placed near the Furukawa riverside benches, came to resemble leaves floating on the water, leading to the name "Konoha Side Table" ("Leaf Side Table"), while the single-holder version was named "Shizuku Side Table" ("Droplet Side Table").

Anker Bak and Takumi Kohgei's Gorgeous Gaze Highback Chair

Rain Noe

\From a distance, this might appear to be a Scandinavian Midcentury classic that you missed.

But a closer look reveals something startling: What appears to be a gigantic slotted screw, the likes of which you'd never see fully exposed in that era.

In fact the chair is modern, by Danish designer Anker Bak and Japanese manufacturer Takumi Kohgei. The Gaze Highback Chair comes both with and without armrests, and the armrest version reveals even more metal:

In this collection, steel is not relegated to a traditional secondary role but is used to highlight functionality with unprecedented openness, where the construction is not hidden but defines each piece's identity.

The warmth of wood beautifully complements the precision of steel, reflecting Bak's desire to create a series where Nordic and Japanese minimalism and aesthetics are expressed openly, with nothing concealed within the design.

The modular nature of this series allows for personal customization. You can choose between chairs with or without armrests, between soft upholstered finishes and a lighter, natural woven rattan option. These choices enable all pieces in the Gaze collection to seamlessly integrate into any space.

The name "Gaze" captures the soul of the series: An invitation to linger, observe, and appreciate one's surroundings in deep comfort, whether you spend a brief moment or an entire day in the chair, whether it faces the calm of nature through a large window or sits on a covered terrace.

Bak also designed a companion footstool:

Both are made of Oak, and upholstered with fabric by Kvadrat.

Unitree Develops Production-Ready Mech Suit

Rain Noe

China's Unitree produces both humanoid robots and dog-bots. Now they've scaled up the former, into something that a driver can climb inside (albeit quite awkwardly). They've just unveiled their GD-01, "the world's first production-ready manned mecha," the company says. It's both drive-able and autonomous (or at least remote-controllable).

The demo video is straight-up weird. First off, they're branding it as a "civilian vehicle." Imagine a city full of people commuting like this:

Secondly, the company writes "Please everyone be sure to use the robot in a Friendly and Safe manner." But they've recorded this for the demo:

Thirdly, you'd think they'd want to work out the ingress and egress before releasing the demo vid:

The following feature is quite innovative: Since the mech suit doesn't have to obey the laws of biology, it can bend over backwards, then walk backwards on all fours just as easily as walking forwards on two.

There's no official word yet on release date or price.

Renault Brings Back the Canvas Roof

Rain Noe

In the mid-20th century, when American carmakers were churning out convertibles, European manufacturers had a thriftier solution: The roll-back canvas roof. It was a much more economical way to provide an open-air experience. The Citroen 2CV and the Renault 4 offered them.

Today Renault has revived the Renault 4 as an EV. And the Plein Sud ("Due South") version of the Renault 4 E-Tech, as it's called, has also brought back the canvas roof.

The Plein Sud canvas roof has been engineered to deliver the joy of open-air driving without compromising refinement or practicality. Operated via a one-touch button or voice control using Renault's Reno digital assistant, the roof opens smoothly to create a wide 80x92cm aperture, allowing both front and rear passengers to enjoy an open, panoramic view of the sky above.

The canvas roof, which gathers cleanly into three folds, can be opened in several intermediate positions to suit the occupants' mood. When closed, its multi-layer construction ensures excellent acoustic and sealing qualities with no trade-off in weight, while there is also minimal impact on headroom compared to the fixed-roof version.

We won't, of course, see this car on American roads; Renault pulled out of the U.S. market in 1987.