A few weeks back, I began an experiment, attempting to create curved, structural panels of laminated cardboard. The first shells, adhered with wheatpaste and cured in a mold, came out quite well. I buried some strips of Masonite in the edges so that they would hold a fastener, then trimmed them neat and square on the table saw.
Next loomed the question of a frame. Cardboard chairs tend to acquire quite a bit of bulk as they try to solve structural problems with a weak material. I wanted to make a visually light, slim-lined frame that would highlight the cardboard shells, so I turned to plywood. Ken Isaac's book, which I recently wrote about, had a lengthy investigation of plywood stress-skin structures, which gave me some ideas about how to make a stiff structure out of a thin, flexible material.
 |
| Frame layout. Designed it in AutoCAD, then sketched on paper because I don't have a printer. |
 |
| Otherwise obsolete hand-drafting skills still come in handy sometimes . . . |
