Mission Table Design: Modeling the Slats (Spindles)

The slats are one of the defining elements of the Arts & Crafts style as designed by the likes of Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright. This is how I modeled them…

If you can’t quite see in the image to the right, click for the bigger one. What the image shows is the creation of a sketch plane using the line and point method, utilizing the Elevation 01 sketch to get a plane at the top of the stretcher. Again, it is very important to not begin sketches by clicking on a face, especially with multi-solid bodied layout parts such as this.

The slat is created in a similar manor to the stretcher and apron, albeit with less complexity. It is just a square stick with tenons on either end, and uses geometry projected from the same sketch that was used to create the slat mortises in the previous post: Mission Table Design: Modeling the Apron —as you can see in the image below…

 

 

The projected geometry in the center was the same geometry that created the mortise in the last article, and will create the tenon in this one. The outer profile was created by using the Offset tool, then adding the formula shown in the image below to fully constrain it. It only takes the one dimension to constrain an offset…

 

With the sketch completed, it’s just a matter of creating the extrusions. The first one will be the tenon, and it was extruded to the length of the Slat_Tenon_Length parameter, and a new solid was created as shown below…

 

…then the body of the slat is extruded up to the slat center plane as shown below…

 

The half slat was then mirrored upwards to complete the slat…

 

 

 

 

The last thing to be done was to pattern the slats exactly the same as the mortises were in the previous post. I reused the formula Slat_Width * 2 ul for the spacing, as well as the count of 13 that was also still in the queue. I created all new solid bodies, but as Dave pointed out, it may have been better to leave it at the single slat and pattern them after the Make Components command as all of the parts are identical and can be re-used in the assembly model. Good point. I’ll check into that workflow after I burn through some of the other stuff in the works. For now, here is the preview at the settings just described…

 

…which gets you this…

 

Later…

 

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