Custom Shoe Holder: Plywood + Glue Gun
Custom shoe holder made out of plywood held together only by glue from a glue gun possible? Yep!
My house has a very small entrance way with an odd little cove that isn’t good for much of anything but now it will hold shoes vertically which is a better use of real estate than horizontally all over the cove.
This isn’t the first shoe holder I designed and made, here’s my first and I far prefer the more modern look over the more cartoonish one I came up about 5 years ago.
It’s always fun to come-up with variations on a theme and yes, I did “copy” my shoe looking design if you look closely at the more modern take on this custom shoe holder I came-up with about a week ago.
This custom shoe holder is made using quarter inch or 6 mm thick plywood, it’s scrap wood left over from a recent job CNCROi.com made using plywood so it’s very much a repurpose and useful one of that for personal use.
My goal with this custom shoe holder was to make a design that’s very airy, that’s why it has lots of holes all over it, so you can easily see inside and it melts into just about any environment it fits into.
One major advantage of CNC routing is the ability to make pockets which would have allowed me to hide the interlocking aspect of this custom shoe holder but as I was painting this project anyways, it didn’t matter and I wanted to test assembly using my glue gun too.
As for why I choose to use our CNC laser yet again to cut another plywood project over the other equipment we have in the shop, notably our CNC router, it’s just because I had it all set-up already and although laser cutting is a far slower process for this application over router cutting, I was just a bit lazy.
The precision and overall look to be honest would have been pretty much identical whether I cut this custom shoe holder using the CNC router or CNC laser, the tolerances and precision are interchangeable.
If you are wondering what cutting with a CNC router looks like, here’s the window treatments I made for the shop to cut down on the amount of light that was coming into the showroom.
I designed a lot of projects using various CNC equipments and materials, as such, I’m as comfortable designing and fabricating with one as I am with the other.
As for the smoky result on plywood from the laser cutting, it is a drawback when it comes to custom designer but as I was painting this anyways, it didn’t matter if this custom shoe holder was wrapped or not.
After assembly using ONLY my glue gun, a first at CNCROi.com, I jumped right into the painting the custom shoe holder, notice how “ugly” the smoking stains look like?
Well, this doesn’t matter at all when using brown paint, everything is hidden and the esthetics improve drastically, I haven’t painted a lot of plywood at CNCROi.com but it’s something I really should start doing more of.
As for other ideas of what CNCROi.com can fabricate using plywood, here’s a simple lamp that can have endless permutations to match just about any decor or theme.
Plywood is strong and very light weight, which makes it ideal for a lot of applications where this is a requirement, and it paints very well too!
I really like the look of this custom shoe holder, you can see the blotches if you look closely at the glue gun glue, it really loves paint, so it’s something I need to be aware of next time around, the huge benefit was the speed.
Generally, gluing something like this custom shoe holder would be a two day job, one day cutting and assembly and the other day taking endless clamps off, in this case, I was literally able to jump to paint a few minutes after the initial glue-up and it’s plenty strong for this application.
Really love the esthetics of this custom shoe holder, I didn’t want a solid brown paint, something a bit more cloudy with variations to me looks way better for this application.
If you want a custom whatever made out of anything, contact CNCROi.com!