Walnut Piano Bench With Butterfly Inlay on CNC

I recently purchased a Casio PX-S7000 piano which had a walnut veneer base. I wanted to design a piano bench that matched the style and looked a bit more modern than a standard piano bench you could buy. The piano bench was made from a single 8" wide 5/4 walnut board. I designed the piano bench in Fusion 360 (file attached so you can modify or build your own). The overall dimensions came out to be around 28" wide, 19" tall and 13" deep. I used a CNC machine to cut the legs and butterfly inlays.

Supplies

Walnut Board - 8" wide, 1" thick, 9' long

Maple board - 4" wide, 8" long, .25" thick

Titebond Glue #2

Kreg pocket hole jig & screws

Shapeoko CNC machine

Table Saw

Router with Chamfer bit

Step 1: Designing the Bench

For those of you who may not be familiar with Fusion 360, it is a great tool by Autodesk which is free for non commercial use. It's my go-to design tool when I need to design something to exact dimensions and especially if I am going to either send it to the CNC machine or 3d printer.

I started with the general dimensions I wanted the piano to be. So I settled on 13"x28" for the top. I designed the top and where I thought I wanted to have the butterfly inlays set. Next I move on to the leg design. I designed a single leg and then mirrored it both in the x and y axis ensuring that they are identical.

Finally I extruded all of the parts and added a chamfer to the edges.

The only paid extension that I have for Fusion360 is the MapBoards Pro extension. It allows you to select the pieces you want to cut, put in the board size you have and then it will map all of the pieces to fit on the board. You could manually do this by moving all of the pieces around, but I really appreciate the efficiency of the tool.

Lastly I setup the milling for the leg. Since the top is only a rectangle I cut that out on the table saw.

Step 2: Cutting & Gluing the Parts

I used the table saw sled to cut the board into 4 pieces. 2 will be used to create the legs and 2 will be glued together to create the top.

Next I took each of the leg boards over to the CNC machine and cut out the legs. The reason I used the CNC for the legs was due to the exact angle I wanted to have the legs connect. I wanted to ensure there was a smooth seam with the legs and wanted it to look as though they flowed together rather than doing a 90 degree joint.

I used dowels and glue to connect the legs together and had to make a basic jig to allow me to clamp them. I just took a scrap piece of wood and put wooden blocks 28" apart to hold the base of the legs in place while I applied clamp pressure from the top. This allows me to glue the legs up and ensure that both sets of legs are exactly 28" width to match the bench.

The bench is held together by 4 pocket hole screws which are mounted into the cross braces. The cross brace parts as well as the legs have dowels and glue to hold them together and with the top of the bench.

Step 3: Chamfers, Inlays and Finishing

After the legs and top were done being glued together I took them over to the router table and put a chamfer on each part to soften the look.

Finally I took the finished top to the CNC again to add the butterfly cuts. I took some scrap maple I had laying around to create the butterfly inlays with.

The final steps were sanding and finishing. I sanded up to a 220 grit on the legs and 400 grit on the top.

For a finish I used a Water Based Poly in a semi-gloss.

Thanks for checking out my instructable. Let me know if you have any questions!