Woodworking

Furniture I'm building, designed before it's cut. Each piece is a parametric OpenSCAD model, and everything downstream — the shop drawings, the jig models, the cut lists, the photoreal renders and the illustrated build guides — is generated from that model, so none of it can drift from the design.

Document unit	10 cells for letter and A4 laid flat, in pine. 26-1/4 × 11 × 22.	building first · guide
Wine rack	12 bottles in walnut, on splayed tapered legs. 10-1/4 × 9 × 39-1/2.	the real one · guide
Footrest	Solid ramp on splayed sides, felt inset. 17 × 10-7/16 × 6-1/4.	a brace, not a platform
Salt boxes	A pair in hardwood, swivelling lids. 3-1/4 sq.	MSG and sugar
Coffee table	48 × 21 × 15 in solid walnut, all joinery hidden.	someday

The document unit and the wine rack are the same model — one parametric cell-grid case in lib/casework.scad, with the cell proportions and the legs switched by parameter. That is deliberate: the document unit is a full rehearsal of the wine rack's joinery at a more forgiving scale and in cheaper wood, and building it teaches the real piece.

Layout

lib/         shared across every project
projects/    one directory per piece
TOOLS.md     what's in the shop, and what each tool takes in consumables
JIGS.md      the shop jigs: cutting layout, build order, and why each number
SHOPPING.md  what still needs buying, with the specs that are easy to get wrong

lib/ is the part that gets reused. The wood shader, the jig models and the guide generator have nothing to do with any particular piece of furniture.

lib/casework.scad	the parametric cell-grid case — wine rack and document unit
lib/jigs.scad	the shop jigs, drawn so they can be seen rather than imagined
lib/export_casework.scad	writes one STL per board, for the renderer
lib/scene.py	the Cycles scene: procedural wood, studio lights
lib/guide.py	builds the illustrated shop guides
lib/cameras.sh	camera helpers — every camera in this repo is written in inches
lib/render_jigs.sh	renders the jig drawings both guides pull from

Each project directory holds its own model or preset, its docs, its render.sh / render_beauty.sh, and its own renders/ and exports/. Run the scripts from anywhere; they locate the repo root themselves.

The coffee table keeps its model in its own directory rather than in lib/, because nothing else uses it. casework.scad is in lib/ because two projects do.

Requirements

brew install --cask openscad   # working drawings, meshes, jig drawings
brew install --cask blender    # photoreal renders only (optional)
pip install pillow             # the guide generator inlines its images

Nothing else. The wood shader is procedural, so there are no texture files to download, and every drawing is generated rather than drawn.

Regenerating everything

projects/wine-rack/render.sh          # OpenSCAD views + STL/3MF   (seconds)
projects/wine-rack/render_beauty.sh   # per-part STLs + Cycles     (minutes)
lib/render_jigs.sh                    # the shared jig drawings
python3 lib/guide.py                  # -> projects/wine-rack/guide.html
python3 lib/guide.py documents        # -> projects/document-unit/guide.html

Units

The design math is in inches, but every model is scaled by UNIT = 25.4 on output, so the scene OpenSCAD draws is in millimetres. This matters: a 40-unit tall object sits right on OpenSCAD's near clip plane, which is what makes the view clip when you zoom in and makes the mouse feel hair-trigger. At mm scale the object is ~1000 units and navigates normally.

Set UNIT = 1 for exports in inches — the render scripts scale their camera positions by the same factor, so they follow automatically.

Beauty renders

The wood is fully procedural — no texture files — so it renders anywhere with nothing to download. Growth rings are built as concentric cylinders about a pith axis outside the board, so cathedral figure is derived from where the board sits in the log rather than faked. Each board is imported as its own object and the shader offsets it by Object Info > Random, anisotropically (metres along the grain, ±15 mm across it) so no two boards match without moving the pith itself.

Species live in WOODS at the top of lib/scene.py: a ring profile (SAW for softwoods — gradual earlywood, abrupt boundary; SIN for diffuse-porous hardwoods), a colour pair, and a knot density. Add one and it becomes a --wood choice.