I’m playing around with the idea of getting a system to make a few projects around the house. Of course, the wife doesn’t understand the difference between simple and complex projects. One of the projects I have been tasked with is to make some cupboards for my son’s bedroom. How viable is it to make a cupboard with a Maslow? The design work doesn’t scare me, I’m a mechanical engineer by trade. It’s more the capabilities of the equipment. Any help or advice for a newcomer is more than welcome.
I am also planning some shelves drawers and cupboards and would be interested in wisdom from people who have done it. I think the coolest part you could do with the maslow would be drawings or patterns on the surfaces as that can’t be done as easily with conventional tools. I had a lot of fun having my niece draw something in inkscape then having the machine make it on wood.
For my drawer design I want to do cool dovetails or at least interlocking edges but I think Maslow may vary by a mm or so. So I am going to do some careful calibration and scaling first and make the plans a little forgiving of small variations. I’ve been slowly working up a design that I would lace together with paracord. For me with the maslow I am thinking about what it can do better or more fun than a regular saw. For cabinets it would be worth it to me if it had surface carving. Non rectangular panels, curves, openwork or cool joinery. There are some inspiring projects in the forums ( will look up links to them when I am back on my computer) a crib with curves and openwork, curved benches. Shelves and display stands. Relief carved panels.
What are your goals for fun features?
If you have not yet wandered through it there are a lot of cool things people have made on this thread:
In my opinion, Maslow’s capabilities are limited only by your imagination; it’s a manual robot that requires careful monitoring of every movement to fully understand.
I make all kinds of furniture with Maslow. I like screwless assembly, but I require great precision, so I start with the joints as a blank and correct them with a hand router and sandpaper.
When it’s a quick project that doesn’t require such high precision, I allow a tolerance of +0.1mm on each side of the joint. This also depends on the plywood, which generally varies in thickness within the same sheet.
I always make a test cut to see how much tolerance I can achieve, and this differs depending on whether the pattern is an internal or external cut. I also have to consider how to arrange the furniture parts on the sheet. Horizontal parts must remain horizontal, and vertical parts must remain vertical to ensure they are dimensionally consistent.
Although I am constantly improving the precision of my cuts.
Thanks for getting back to me. That is interesting to learn your trick for getting it to fit well. Do you trust is accuracy for things like door hinge and drawer mounting holes?
I’ve never actually tried this; I always leave those details to be done manually, since wood tends to change shape and I usually do the cutting on the front of the material, while these details are usually on the back. But it does seem like an excellent idea. I’m going to try it, including those details in the design; that could save a lot of work.