DIY Cardboard Furniture

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Video Transcript

On this episode of Gomi Style, we are talking about cardboard. The humble material that you use for boxing up everything from toys to shoes to furniture. By now, most communities collect and recycle their cardboard turning it into something useful like insulation or bed padding. But here on Gomi Style, we think we can go one better. And actually reuse, not recycle the cardboard and avoid the waste stream altogether. But first, we got to get enough material to actually do the work. So we are here at San Francisco Recycle Central to get some of the material before it gets recycled.

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Most people think of cardboard as a material that really does not have a lot of strength. Once it has bends or scarred, it sort of looses its structure of integrity. But really, that is not true. Now this spot, you can see it is already kind of falling apart, but just like keeping the relative structural integrity up right here, and up right on this angle, it is holding its entire 750 ton body weight.

So, Chad, this is the approach that you are going to take. From what it looks like you are going to be using nothing but pieces of cardboard up right like this and then a series of pieces kind of flooded into it like this and as you put those pieces together, that makes a structural unit.

Now, we are making another chair here using cardboard that is much more raw and scrappy and the pieces do not matter so much. We are going to use the technique that kind of compensate for that. It so makes something structural even though the pieces are pretty sloppy. What we are going to end up with is a kind of loud chair that looks something like this, low to the ground, comfortable, something that you would not mind sitting in to watch a movie or play video games. We will see how far we get. But what is interesting is that chair is actually being compressed together because there is a hole drilled to each piece with a long threaded rod through that holes and then there is just a washer and another near the end compressing all that cardboard together.

Alright Charlie. I found this cheap piece of crisp board from the bookshelf and this is just strong enough to make a template that we can reuse over and over again. We got a nice smooth line for the sealing area. We got three compression-drilled holes. Those threaded rod will go through that hole holding this piece in line and at that compression hole, all those pieces together, it will be strongly be the paperwork.

[Music playing]

We got Charlie's set up now with an assembly lock so it can easily measure, draw and cut if it is a cardboard to match the others. Meanwhile, we let Chad loose to develop his own chair design as he goes along.

These two designs could not be more different from one another. Charlie's chair uses a very simple approach and requires a minimum of design experience. The challenge is that it requires a huge amount of material to make. Chad's chair uses solo cardboard that is he made use of a single large cardboard box. But this will be technical challenge to design a working chair strong enough to use everyday. This project is a great example. Not of recycling, but of reuse. Recycling would involve taking this material to a processing plant where it gets shredded, broken down and remanufacture then the insulation in another product. But here on Gomi Style, we feel it is always better to reuse the material and keep it out of the waste stream altogether.

As an everyday chair, this particular design it would probably have to give us some down too. Like we suspected, this back leg had a no support under it all, it is a little bit flimsy. But this was a good experiment. We tried to design and we just pretty much made up on the spot and it really only took us a couple hours of labor to figure out if the design works. I would say we are mostly there and with just a couple of modifications, this design would be rock solid. You can see that you got a piece going this way and a piece going this way. What you are really missing is the third component of a piece going this way, on each of the legs and that way, this leg would then become very independently strong in structure, whereas right now they still have a tendency to be flexible.

All in all, our experiments were pretty interesting. We learned a couple of things. One, from this lounge chair that we made, we learned that when you compress cardboard together, it becomes extremely strong, rigid and structural. So, I think we should make one or two more chairs like this, or even turn it into a couch, but the next reuse project for the game room is a coffee table or some end tables. I think the perfect material for that would some found seal plate as mother's ground from doing it. Stay tuned for that project.