Off the trailNumber 10Object making

Multiped Coat Rack

A coat rack with many feet, joined by dowels, milled from both sides.

Kind: Furniture
Made with: 3-axis CNC, flip milling, dowel joinery
The name: Multiped: anything with many feet

A tall wooden coat rack of slender curved limbs crossing at the middle, against a stone wall

Object making

Furniture, ceramics and panels from three years in Woodbury's digital fabrication lab. Mostly plywood, clay, and a CNC mill.

The aim was an elegant rack through simple joinery: something that stands, holds a coat, and goes together fast.

The limbs join in nine places. A domino tool cuts the mortises and dowels fill them, and because every side is symmetrical to its opposite, assembly is quick and hard to get wrong.

Each limb is double-curved, which a 3-axis mill can't reach in one pass. So they were flip-milled: cut one side, turn the stock over, cut the other.

The rack's limbs laid out flat as a cutting layout on a pale green sheet — The cutting layout.

White line drawing of the rack's limbs and joints on a dark ground

White line drawing of the assembled rack on a dark ground

The finished rack standing against a stone wall

The rack with a dark coat hung on one limb