Have you ever heard of a living hinge? No? I hadn’t either, until I came across a notebook design on Etsy. It’s essentially wood or acrylic that has a zillion cuts in it so the material will bend and flex. People make boxes, notebooks, jewelry, bowls, lamp shades, clothing, even chairs and chaise lounges with it. In my quest to breathe some personality into the mundane and against aspects of our home we are making doorbell chime box covers. We haven’t tried the living hinges before so as we frequently do, we turn to trusty cardboard to fabricate a prototype and gain an understanding of the mechanics as well as the aesthetics of the design before using increasingly expensive woods and acrylics. You can see our progression here.

I want to use a different design so we made a different prototype. It was a bust for our application but it is still cool to look at.

So I chose a third design, still mid century modern, my favorite style, and went for a third iteration. Cardboard is our friend!

Here is a little something we are working on in parallel. It’s going to be a cutting board. Right now the pieces are glued and clamped and drying. The plan is to cut a juice groove into it on the CNC after it’s leveled and trimmed. I’ll keep you posted!

The living hinge doorbell box has unexpectedly turned into a saga. If you’re tired of hearing about our mistakes on the cardboard prototypes scroll on through to the final project. If you’re here to learn along with us, read on.

I love the herringbone pattern and after seeing a herringbone hinge last night I asked Cameron if we could use that design for our covers (we have two chime boxes). He designed the following pattern and I cut the video off too soon so the fail is in the shorter clip. Essentially, it didn’t bend. Looks good, but zero function.

Again, I cut the video off too soon, just certain that the pattern would work, but NO!

So we went back to the brick lay pattern but with a revision in the size of the “holes”. The first cut was too transparent for our application but was plenty flexible. Cameron make the holes smaller, thereby making the lines between the spaces thicker, and thankfully we ended up with success in form and function. We have some ideas about how to modify the herringbone pattern in the future, but we went on to cut the brick lay pattern out of 1/8th inch maple plywood. I might paint it, I might stain it, and I might leave it as is. Undecided for the moment.

We have learned a LOT over the past few days. Note to self, wood is not cardboard! Also, I haven’t seen this done but I’m thinking that the living hinge designs would make for very cool window shades! They’d be semi-private and depending on the design chosen you might even be able to make them out of acrylic, but flexible geometric wooden blinds sound cool!

Cameron clamped and glued it; I’ll post our finished product when it’s mounted. Until then, I hope the east coast folks are staying dry tonight.

Dana