What if you need something VERY unusual, and have to build it in an unusual way?
Lots of people buy furniture every day. Whether that's second hand in the classifieds, or new from a department store, or Ikea, or "Hardly Normal" (a.k.a: "Harvey Norman" here in Australia). Now it's ok if you can buy what you need, but what if you can't?
By "can't".... I mean "really, and genuinely can't".
What if your situation is so weird, that no-one has probably ever to bothered to make something for a situation so ridicuous, obscure, and perhaps.... insane.
What if you have a the unholy mix of:
- A full height wine fridge that this needs to work around,
- tower speaker, facing sideways, that due to surround sound placement options can't be moved.
- a rat nest of power cabling running an ad hoc pile of miscellaneous battery chargers and their paraphernalia,
- a collection of battery chargers precariously balanced on aforementioned speaker,
- an even bigger collection of battery chargers scattered around the house,
- a cat who adopts live rodents who love living in the cable mess, and...
- such a shortage of space, that you want a single charging location for every battery type in the house, and
- storage for all of the cabling, charged and "to be charged" batteries, and some other useful tools.
Oh...and you have little else than the hundreds of pieces of scrap MDF wood littering your workshop (that you're also rebuilding from scratch) to build it from... Does that sound like fun?
If you've ever been absolutely galled by the amount of scrap wood you throw out... or just have natural "wood bit" hoarding tendencies in the vain hope of "it might be useful some day" then you're not alone. However, the workshop has finite space and it got.... pretty bad.
If it's too small to be useful, make it bigger!
Have an old 20L(4.4 gallon) vat of PVA glue, and a stubborn streak? Start gluing the scrap wood into usable panels, trim those down, then glue those panels together (while assembling the trimmings into usable panels as well) and several weeks/months later you too can have a patchwork quilt equivalent of a furniture piece. Don't forget the copious amount of gap filling, and sanding you need to do... and bracing every part during clamping so you have at least "flat-ish" panels.
I now have SO much less scrap polluting my workspace, and a viable, partially-assembled piece of furniture.
Now, all this effort just saved me buying 3 sheets of 16mm (5/8") MDF, it's not what I'd call a "good" idea in production... but if you've got moments between other projects where you can clean up, joint, glue and clamp just one extra bit of scrap on several individual panels each day (about 15 mins work)... that adds up surpisingly quickly. Perfect for "paint grade" projects.
This cupboard is about 189cm tall (a shade over 6 feet), together, it takes up very little space, but as scattered scrap bits, they take up at least 4-10x the volume.. unless you have them perfectly stacked somewhere.. and, if we're being honest here.... Who does that with scrap wood?
If a picture saves reading a thousand words? How about four?
A slight change in plan.... that may change again...
I originally designed this section of the charging station to be a standard cupboard, with adjustable shelves and a door. So I built it that way, and drilled all the shelf pin holes.
However, it occurred to me that we can make this more spatially efficient. Because the original plan would have:
- The shelf pins, in their holes, and the plastic attachment for increased surface area, and pin retention options, if shaped that way.
- The wooden shelf on top of those pins.
- A box filled with stuff on top of that...
- A door in front eating into the available space vertically.
So for every box, there are three layers down, and at least two layers in front that are completely unusable. I like the adjustable pin idea, I just don't like the wasted space.
Maybe I can do better.... while keeping the shelf pin idea alive.
Small drawers... and making them as spacious as possible...
Standard drawer slides eat 1/2" (12.7mm) on either side of an already small drawer, (a combined loss of 1" narrower drawers) and the price of the tiny 200mm (about 8") slides was nuts. So I had to get creative.
So I designed a parametric 3D printable drawer rail to fit the longer shelf pins I ordered on AliExpress, and incorporated the pins/rails into the one custom-made unit. Installed them, spaced them at suitable heights and literally built the drawers around them to spec. The vertical gaps between drawer slides are only 1-2mm more than the height of the drawers themselves so they tilt and hold in place when open, the drawer fronts are NOT false fronts (to make the drawers a little larger, and they extend up to hide the rails holding the drawer above it. The sides are literally 1-2mm smaller than the sides of the cavity, and all the sides and bottom of the drawers were sanded to 320grit to reduce friction even further.
Continuing on the scrap use...
3D printing routinely leaves me with spools of filament that have enough to keep, but not enough to do most projects.. so I just used them all up. I didn't care if it'd take three filament spool changes to print one drawer rail, and because it'll be hidden by the drawers when they're installed... I wasn't picky on the colour either. Fluourescent and translucent green? Sure! A hodge-podge of black and two different shades of grey.. why not? No one will see it! I finished off 8 rolls of esoteric filament scraps... which further cleaned up some much needed space in the workshop.
... and the result?
It works well, the unit can still have shelves if we need to go that way, and small, light, low-use drawers on plastic rails should last years. By then, I'll probably have more scrap filament and wood to adapt things :-)
What should the charging station look like?
So, you may have noticed that there's an empty-but-decent-sized section at the top, and that's to set up an adaptable charging station.
So here's a sample of our charger list:
- 1x 24 socket AA/AAA charger.
- 4x 4 socket AA/AAA chargers.
- 3x Canon LP-E6/LP-E6N battery chargers
- 1x Dual socket LP-E6/LP-E6N charger
- 1x Canon LP-E8 battery charger
- 1x Canon BP-511A battery charger
- 2x Sony NP-BX1 battery chargers
- 2x 8 port USB-A chargers
- 1x 6 USB-C port (100W each), 4x USB-A (60W each) uber charger
- 2x 9V battery chargers
- 1x 4 port 18650 (et al) charger
- 2x DJI drone chargers
- Several PC & Mac "notebook" chargers,
Everything else either directly charges off AC, or one of the USB chargers listed above with specific cables... whether that's a phone, a gimbal, studio lighting equipment, head lamps/torches, or even our wireless doorbell.
With that many chargers, that's over 20 outlets! So I have to wire up 3x 8 port server grade power boards, add suitable surge protection, a power monitor to see what's going on electrically, and carefully choose a suitable RCBO (that's electrician speak for fancy breaker with additional safety features... most notably that O bit for overload protection), set it up so I can turn the bits on that I need, and leave the rest off... oh and have a light in there somewhere as well.
I need to do all of that, and have to make it so the chargers can be taken with us on trips, and when in the station, easily attach and stay safely in place.
That's no small shopping list of goals for such as small space.....
Honestly... I can't do dozens of iterations of this layout here because I just don't have the time. I may have to make some compromises somewhere... but I'll give it a go... once I've received all the electrical components I've ordered.
Design considerations and preparation:
One of the key features of this charging station is a narrow section behind the back panel to house (and hide) the wiring and at least two of the three power boards for a cleaner look.
There are several down-sides that need addressing though:
- Certain safety features such as the power switches and overload breakers that's built into each power board won't be easily accessible from the front. So they either need to be moved, or replaced by more accessible options.
- Some of the "wall wart" power adaptors for some of the chargers simply do not fit in the narrow space available, so they will need modification, replacement or an even more creative solution.
- The back panel eats into the depth for any shelving... so space "out front" will need to be managed more carefully.
- Choosing to use a series of smaller-but-similar dimensioned chargers for a consistent and space-saving look, rather than several differently sized and shaped and wasting space.
- The space needed by multiple power boards, all the cabling (and plugs) leading into them needs to be managed carefully, and yet, somehow still accessible through removable panels.
- The whole "front section" needs to be removable for maintenance and modification of "the back", so a modular design of the whole charging section is needed. Ideally it needs detachable cabling, and look pretty good... (I guess we'll see).
- There is a risk of cabling (and small chargers/accessory/batteries) "falling into the back") so a means to allow cords through (tidily) while ensuring nothing falls back through is worth looking into.
The other big down side, is that... I need to wait for even more deliveries to arrive in order to accomplish some of these goals.
Starting on the charging section...
Arguably one of the strangest shaped woodworking pieces I've ever built. I've incorporated a low and mid height shelf, where the middle shelf has not one, but three USB chargers in it (only one shown here), where the cabling can connect devices on either shelf.
Each shelf also has an 8 socket power board behind it, so we can run short cables through a removable face-plate that hides the rats nest.
I placed a third power board at the top, vertical to handle the usual "wall wart" styled battery chargers, like the ones shown here.
There's a low "hutch" for to make room for larger devices like tablets and laptops below the lower shelf, as well as a space for the touch-panel switches that'll go on the right (where all the wood filler is located because I had too much and don't like contaminating my bucket of the pristine stuff... so I scraped it off my putty knife, and will sand it back later).
The circuit breaker and power monitor will go in the top-right corner, and all of the DC power supplies for the lights and "difficult-to-fit" wall-wart powered chargers" on the top left. The huge AA/AAA charger smack dab in the above the middle hole there. (Horizontal penciled-in rectangle).
Adding lighting, testing PSU loads, smart meter, and assessing last panel modification options.
This is the first time I've actually wired the RCBO, smart meter, and lighting in. I've also mounted the lower LED light strip to the final spot using clips. The upper LED will eventually be attached to the actual charging station once the panel is installed.
Now it might seem weird that I'm putting the electrical system together, only to tear it down again and paint the panel. Doing this allows me to see the real world issues (such as running cables from A to B efficiently, what brackets I need to 3D print to mount power supplies "in the back", whether or not a tiny 15W, 12V DIN rail power supply can reliably run two LED strips of unknown wattage rating. Clearly it can!
I've learned a lot from this "test installation"...
I need to make some more holes to mount some additional chargers where they need to go, tidy up the cabling routes that will be required, add some minor woodworking tweaks here and there, and I need to make these changes before I paint so I can't mess up any paint job. Then it's time for sanding, painting, and the final build of the system.
The scrap wood project, practically finished.
There's little more motivating to get this project finished than visitors, newly-restored battery powered devices necessary for work, and a need for everything to be cleaned up for the aforementioned guests.
Left: Here's the finished product,"in situ" with speaker shown. The whole unit is magnetically attached to the fridge using salvaged magnets from scrapped hard drives. This is done to prevent tipping.. and use up old scrap drives!
Right: Here's a shot of the near complete charging panel. I need to make some covers for the power boards (and cords) in the back, but that'll keep for now. The charging panel is reconfigurable, you can power everything, or just a few chargers, and the best part is, with all the smart chargers, low powered LED screens and lights, the whole system only takes what it needs, which is often below 30W. Thank you to the folks who brought us GaN-based improvements on switch mode power supplies! The energy efficiency improvements are amazing!
For the Audiophiles who've read this far....
Now I know most audiophilic mavens out there will disparage the proximity of a wine fridge to a high end sound system. However, I've taken the liberty of adding significant damping to the mount of the wine fridge's compressor, (don't worry it can still breathe and doesn't overheat) and given the open plan living space... having beverages and cheese on hand during a "listening session" ... I have to say Is pretty sweet. :~)
That said, this certainly won't work with every speaker....
This tower speaker is a Paradigm Studio 60, from their fifth (and last) generation of the Studio series before they replaced the whole series with the "Prestige" lineup in 2015. These are, by no means "cutting edge".
Yet, in the right conditions, these well-used speakers still outperform a lot of speakers sold today... even those sold at much higher prices. Now I know they're not "the best" speaker in the world... (as if one speaker is better than all the others in every situation... which is ludicrous), but properly tuned, the Studio series have a very pleasing, pretty detailed sound, and decent sound stage that I would have to spend a lot of money to surpass in a multi-role sound system like this.
However, despite my frustrations with the Studio series subwoofer amplifiers (not the best built by any means, since I have two failing sub amps on my work bench... yet again) I'm perfectly happy with the tuned performance of Studio series for all of our needs.
I wouldn't normally recommend sticking tower speakers in a box like this, because confining most tower speakers would normally impact the sound quality quite negatively. I can get away with it with this particular tower speaker for three reasons:
- The speakers and ports are all "front firing". (so they aren't impacted by the cabinet surrounding the tower). Also,
- The speaker actually stands forward and slightly proud from the cabinet edge, reducing any accoustic refraction or distortions... at least far less than the wine fridge itself used to do when we were more worried about knocking the speaker over when walking past. Previously, we positioned the speaker to be "less proud" of the fridge itself after two near-knock-over events... so basically, for safety's sake, we placed it in a somewhat less-ideal accoustic position.
- Tower speakers are best stood at or near the floor level, and this cabinet has a heavy MDF construction, placed directly on a tile/concrete slab. No resonating shelves are needed to raise this speaker up to a suitable height, and on the deck of a tile covered concrete slab, resonance is vastly reduced.
Now, if my intended speaker had rear or side-mounted ports/radiators/speakers... this would be a terrible setup. However, in the current situation, this somewhat rare speaker design and bespoke construction of this project work quite beautifully together.
Admittedly, after testing, there is a subtle difference in tone between the left surround speaker shown here in the hutch and its twin on the right, sitting in open air... but it's very subtle. Given this is a surround speaker, (not exactly the dominant role given to the fronts/centre speaker) and that it's in the correct position for Dolby Atmos, it's an improvement on the old messy setup, aesthetically and accoustically.
Now if my speakers die, or we move house, or if I upgrade, it will be a significant challenge to find similar speaker designs that work in the same way, and even if I do... they might not even fit.
This is the issue with such bespoke setups, and I've known that all along. However, depending on the changes implemented, I may also have a more spacious or natively-useful layout in a new situation... and so the constraints I currently face, may not be relevant. Only time will tell, and worrying about it is pointless at this stage.
In conclusion....
In the meantime, I'm happy how this came out, and used a ton of scrap wood, an old vat of glue, left-over 3D printer filament, salvaged hard disk parts, left over remnants of wiring from my CNC and 3D printer enclosure, I've also integrated unused power supplies from abandoned projects, a salvaged touch switch panel, and even two LED lights out of an old six-light system.
I call that, a decently scrappy project. What do you think?
Now, I'm going to leave it here because believe it or not, I've gotta charge my laptop! No prizes for guessing where that'll happen :-D
