Anne-Gabrielle is a young professional working in marketing. When the pandemic broke, she sought to replace her old wooden desk that was too small and out-dated so that she could work efficiently from home several days a week. Unable to find a workstation that she liked, she decided to design a custom home office for herself using tinktube tubes and connectors!
Ordering materials for her DIY project
While visiting the tinktube website, Anne-Gabrielle came across our industrial office plan. She thought to herself that she could use it to create her own DIY home office.
To bring her project to life, she decided to order several pieces, such as 92-inch copper tubing and some black corner connectors. She also bought a tube cutter with 1 blade and a 5mm Allen key on our online store to easily cut and assemble tubes.
The two-inch rule
Once the materials arrived, Anne-Gabrielle was eager to get started! To avoid design errors, she began by carefully measuring the tubes, keeping the two-inch rule in mind.
This is because tubetinkerers must remove a two-inch length each time they cut a tube to be inserted into a connector. If they need to connect a tube for use with two connectors (one on each end), they should instead remove four inches; otherwise, the structure will be wobbly. Hence the importance of measuring!
Watch our video tutorial for a perfect explanation and demonstration:
Cutting the tubes properly
Once the tubes were correctly measured, our DIY enthusiast could move on to cutting! tinktube tubes can be cut easily using a portable band saw or stationary band saw. Since Anne-Gabrielle didn’t have these kinds of tools at home, she opted to use a tube cutter with 1 blade, a very affordable tool at tinktube that does the job just as well.
As explained in this video tutorial, the tube cutter is easy to use:
She first inserted each of the tubes into the tool. Then she gently tightened the screw and made several turns around the tubes with the cutting tool. Every two or three turns, she tightened the screw a little more to cut the tube a little deeper. All in all, cutting all those tubes only took a few minutes, and a little elbow grease!
