This is part 1 in a series of articles describing in detail the process that went into designing and building a unique coffee table with a large 3D wood carving covered by glass.  As an unfair teaser, I will refrain from showing a photo of the finished table until the final part in this series of articles is posted.  Check back often as you won’t want to miss the unveiling of this spectacular table.

This project started as an idea to construct a one-of-a-kind coffee table.  The goal was to create a coffee table that would fit very well into a ranch house, log house, chalet house or a rustic country home.

The result was a table made out of Western Red Cedar and Douglas Fir.  We love the natural colors of wood and are not big on coloring it.  So the cedar was a really good option because of the wonderful color and grain variations.  We will have to say that the fir was in fact stained to look better with the cedar.

So hang on and enjoy the ride as we dive into how this one-of-a-kind coffee table came to be.

Part 1 – Concept and Design

The first step, as in any wood project, is to glue up the wood blanks needed for various parts of the table.  In this case, I needed a 1.5″ thick slab for the table top and four 3.5″ square blocks for the legs.  The table aprons were a single fir board.  Once I knew the sizes of material I had to work with it was time to start, what is becoming more and more, the other side of woodworking – computer design.  I find myself spending a lot of time doing designs.  As I put a new design together I take into account the possibility that down the road I just might want to use this design again.  So I take time to ensure that the design can be easily scaled up or down depending on a customers’ needs.

The next step involved creating the model and then the tool path files.  I did a lot of learning as I created this design.  The first step was to find a background scene.  This was placed into the model.

I used a program called Aspire from Vectric, LTD. to do all of the 3D modeling for this table.  This is a very powerful computer aided manufacturing (CAM) program that can be used to create your art model as well as all the necessary files needed by the CNC machine to cut and carve.  Getting all these individual models into the background scene, and then getting them positioned was a challenge.  I wanted the Eagle to be a foreground piece while the elk across the lake had to be made more background.

I wanted the elk in the foreground to look like it was running to you from the bear.  I made extensive use of design features in Aspire to get this to work.  There was a lot of playing with the depth (how far in or out of the background) for the individual animals and the background scene to get everything to work right and not cut through the 1.5″ thick table top material.  After several hours of playing around and experimenting with different parameters I came up with the final model ready to create the tool paths.

Creating the Tool Paths

With Aspire, creating tool paths is a pretty easy operation especially with a design that is mainly 3D models.  In this case I created a roughing tool path and two finish passes.  The roughing pass I set up to cut across the grain.  I’ve found with certain woods, that when you rough cut with the grain, there is a good chance of major chunks of wood blowing out of the material.  This has happened to me many times with hickory and oak.  I noticed that cedar is also one of these blow-out tendency woods.  The next pass was a finishing pass across the grain.  The final pass was a finishing pass with the grain.  This gave me a finished carving with very little sanding required.  The last tool path was to texture the table surface.  This is very easy using Aspires texturing option.  You just need to remember to set the proper boundary vectors so you don’t waste an inordinate amount of time texturing the air above the area where the 3D carving is.  This is done by creating two rectangles.  One borders the carving and the other borders the outside of the table.  Set the texturing path so it takes place inside these two bounding rectangles.

The roughing tool path file ended up being over 175K lines of code.  The finishing tool path file was over 2.2 million lines of code.  Once the roughing and finish passes were complete, completed the texture pass.

In Part 2 of this series, we will cover the carving aspects of this project.  We will first cover the CNC carving and then the hand carving that was done to finish the project.  Keep checking back for this second article on the 3D Carved Coffee Table.

Thank you for taking the time to reviewing this article and I would love your comments and feedback.

Go to part 2 of making this coffee table.

Don