Even our benches are cool and as just much thought, planning, and fun went into their development as we put into our other projects. Find out more about how our fabrication department took customer feedback and turned it into a project that is eye catching, flexible, and able to provide comfy breaks for people during gameplay.
Installation Date: 3/9/2019
Project Duration: 3 Weeks – 18 Benches
The Electric Playhouse Benches began with a response to customer feedback of people wanting more spaces to rest between playing all of the fun games.
The project was originally proposed by Brandon Garrett and gave the fabrication department a very open prompt. Wesley Eccles and Owen Schwab took on this project and did some preliminary research to best understand what is currently out there and how we can create a unique bench. Early on we decided that it would be important that these benches are very modular. We wanted the ability to be able to configure them in various arrangements for all the different types of events that happen at the playhouse. We also knew that we wanted the benches to light up and be very visible.
We both did some preliminary design ideas and ended up setting on very similar styles. These styles consisted of a single sheet of plywood folded around plywood legs with a pattern cut into it to get the light out.
From there we did some testing to understand the best way to bend the plywood and settled on a method called “Curf Cutting”. This method consists of cutting the wood almost all the way through, leaving a thin layer and benching it around a specific radius. This method takes quite a bit of fine-tuning but once we got all the spacing correct we were able to create a CNC file that could accurately reproduce the shape.
In part 2, learn about the secret code that is embedded in the design. You can read it here.
