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More Laser Kerf Steel Bending: The HandBend Furniture Design System

In your opinion, does exposed laser joinery lend itself to metal?

By Rain Noe - June 24, 2015

in Furniture Design | Digital Fabrication

In addition to Taglio Laser's square steel pipe bending method, France's HandBend Furniture is giving the method a go. The latter company aims to ship you their products flatpack, and have you bend them into their final form by hand before fastening the pieces together. Let's take a quick look at what they do, before getting to the question I'd like to ask you:

HandBend Furniture

There are a couple differences between the two: While Taglio Laser is more of a job shop that one can subcontract, HandBend is a full-on design brand producing finished furniture pieces, which can be ordered in custom sizes.

HandBend Furniture

But there's another key difference, this one kind of ironic. One of Taglio Laser's target market is manufacturers of chassis. Those are not meant to be seen by the end-user of whatever they're integrated within. Nevertheless, Taglio's joints are visually beautiful and seam-to-seam (see below).

Taglio Laser

In contrast, the furniture constructed by HandBend leaves the joinery (or perhaps more properly, "transitions") well visible, wearing its production method on its sleeve, so to speak; the cutouts leave no mystery as to the forming method, and even draw the eye with their graphic noticeability.

HandBend Furniture

My question is, do you like this, do you find it pleasing as an effect? It's subjective, but I don't. And I realize this may make me a metal-vs.-wood hypocrite. I've got no problem with visible dovetails and box joints like the following...

Image/work by Matthias Wandel

...even though I know these are rarely hand-cut these days, but are in fact created with machines, just as HandBend's stuff is. Yet something about the latter's aesthetic bugs me. There's something pleasing about the perceived tactility of a dovetail or boxtail that's been sanded flush, and that seems absent in the starkly mechanical voids of these laser joints/transitions.

HandBend Furniture

Your thoughts?

(h/t to Adam T. for pointing us towards HandBend.)

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Comments

Jo Mo

9 years ago

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This is purely an aesthetic thing, take it or leave it. Manufacturing wise this would be way more expensive than traditional crush bending or even mandrel bending (which both processes work harden the material making it stronger). Whats more upsetting is that this requires an extra piece of metal to keep the corners' shape! That is the real tragedy here.
Handbend = Hand-un-bend.

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- Rain Noe
  
  Jo Mo
  
  9 years ago
  
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  Jo, good points. I think they're relying on the consumer finding it "fun" to bend into shape, and that doesn't seem to outweigh the drawbacks you mentioned. The Taglio Laser stuff on the other hand seems to provide better utility and effective innovation.
  
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Simon Kwan

9 years ago

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I can see more interesting applications for laser kerf bending in metal for non-structural parts, such as computer or amplifier housings, where the kerf patterns can save money on tooling and at the same time act as ventilation. If you've got to have holes to vent heat or circulate air, the holes may as well be additionally useful.

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Camilo Velasquez

9 years ago

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To your point, this kind of visible detail in wood mimics the aesthetic of a fine craft that visually implies skill, quality, attention to detail - because thats what it takes to get the most out of that medium.
In metal, this kind of visible joinery does the opposite, at least from the perspective of quality and craftsmanship. To get the most from the medium, metal should be formed to it's intended shape, and this is clearly a clever shortcut to make the medium more mass market friendly, cheaper and convenient.
Those are desirable qualities to many consumers, but I think the average person has seen enough of these tricks to recognize it, and associate it with the likes of IKEA. Mass-produced, cheap, disposable, temporary.

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hower dower

9 years ago

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Nice!!! Industrial Soul

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Raul Rautenberg

9 years ago

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1º- The paint will crack
2º- Lack of structural rigidity
But... I think this is good as experimental/conceptual use of a precision tecnology.

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Nigel Alcorn

9 years ago

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If you are someone who moves apartments / houses frequently, this provides a nice way to have furniture of substantial material that can be broken down for efficient packing and transport.

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- Jonathan Kolodner
  
  Nigel Alcorn
  
  9 years ago
  
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  Repeated flexing is a horrible idea for this—you're going to cause a weak-point and a failure and break your furniture if you un-bend the joint.
  
  If you try to flat-pack it while bent, whoopee-doo, it's still not fully space efficient because it won't nest well with it's own pieces or go in a box well, because of the voids inside the rounded-rectangle frames.
  
  I agree with Raul Rautenberg, it's a good experimental/conceptual thing, but I'm not buying it as-is.
  
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