I am starting this thread for ideas on reinforcing, or strengthening your cardstock builds. If you have any ideas feel free to post them here, I have a few more for later, but here's one for now to open this thread with. Below are some ideas for furniture. The ideas I present are as durable and supportive as my matboard builds, without going to the same extreme. The pictures will explain it all.

Chairs, Tables and Barstools Basic:

Take your piece and build it as normal, cut, score, fold, edge, glue..., now take your brace...what brace, what do you mean what brace? Oh, ya, guess you'll have to make one.
Well, that's simple eneogh. You want the brace to be slightly shorter than the length of the tabletop, or chairseat, or other from front to back (remember, two pieces of folded cardstock are added to the interior of the piece when you fold the backsides of the legs in in most cases.

How do you do this, well, take the piece your cutting out, and line up a blank piece of scrap cardstock of needed size and line it up with the cut and score lines of the piece your building.
Now, where you would normally make the score lines for the top to legs connection, adjust your ruler the width of one thickness of cardstock (a very slight adjustment, easily eyeballed), though use a ruler for the scoring part, and score the scrap paper, now move the ruler to the opposite side of the table, where the other legs connect and repeat (you want the adjustment to be towards the center of the top of the table, not outwards towards the legs).

Note that I said score the scrap piece, not cut it. Now, make a tab of your size, it can be small or large depending on your preference by cutting outside of the scoreline on both sides, you should have a brace that looks like this.


For comparison, here is one beside the chair it was intended for.


You can also make this piece as deep or as short as you want, it doesn't seem to matter, though the thinner you go, the less durablilty. Here is a shot of two finished braced chairs, one with a deeper brace, and the other with a brace that is half as deep, there is no durability difference between the two as far as I can tell.


For the tables, or structures with long tops, it helps to add an upper scored tab for strengthening the tables top surface as seen here.


Here is what the table looks like from underneath with the brace glued into place.


Here is what the braced table and chairs will look like when finished.


You can also do a barstool using this method.


Here are some shots of these pieces holding up mini's to show the durablility and strength added with these simple means.




While I do like matboard, and the ones I've done to date, I've been trying to speed up the process while maintaining the durability. Except for the barstool, that is something that I have never bothered to try in matboard, way too small, even I'm not that crazy . I want the pieces to reflect WW's original ideas, and to show of how durable they can be under the right conditions and with little effort that anyone can easily do !