Coffee Table with Carved Wildlife Scene

We have the honor of having an article written about us on the Vectric LTD website at the following location:  http://www.vectric.com/WebSite/Vectric/aspire/apsire_case_wildlife_table.html.

This is a technical article on the design construction and finishing of the wildlife scene coffee table we are also running a series of articles on.

Vectric LTD is the developer of the design software we use extensively in our day to day operations when we design and build a new project for our clients that incorporate 3D carving.

This was a great honor for them to do this article.  Please take a moment to go the link and read the article.

Thank you,

Don

In part 1 of “Coffee Table with 3D carving” we covered preliminary concepts and ideas and then got into some of the design aspects of this project.  In this part, we will cover the carving aspects.

I apologize for the picture formatting.  Unfortunately the WordPress editor is PATHETIC when it comes to trying to get a nicely formatted article.

CNC Carving

This table was a challenge to carve.  The wood carving was completed in two stages.  First we used CNC router carving to remove most of the material.  This encompassed what is called a “toolpath” file that had over 2.3 million instructions that were interpreted by the CNC machine to make it go back and forth and up and down along the table top.  All the while there is a very sharp cutting bit spinning at about 10000 revolutions per minute to clear the waste.  This is a large and complex carving.  It took the CNC machine almost 25 hours to complete the carving work.

CNC Router Carving

CNC Router Carving

The two pictures show a little of the carving process.  You can see the carving in action by viewing our YouTube videos below.  The first video shows the process of carving the wildlife scene in the top of the table.  The second video shows how the “worm tracks” were put into the aprons on the table.  The last video shows how the legs were textured to achieve a more rustic look.

Hand Carving

The next step in a project like this is to take the work done by the CNC and refine it using hand chisels and sandpaper.  The 3-axis CNC can, at best, cut straight down from the surface.  It cannot undercut.  Hand carving utilizes several different chisels ranging from straight to fluted to V-carve.  The idea is to undercut parts of the carving to make features really stand out.  For example, the elk located center left had a lot of undercutting done to make it really pop out from the background.  The area around the head is undercut by almost a 1/4″.  This makes the head look like it is really off the background.  The eagle was another area where undercutting really made it stick out from the background.

You can see some of the detail after the hand carving has been completed.

Coffee table ready for hand carving

Bear carving detail

Elk carving detail

The last picture shows the table top with all the hand carving completed.  At this point it is ready to have sealer applied so I can start the coloring part of the project.  We will cover the finishing in part 3 of this series.  That will be the last article in the series.

I appreciate your taking the time to read along and see how a coffee table is taken from a simple wood table to a one of a kind table.

]]> http://dlwoodworks.com/furniture/building-a-coffee-table-with-3d-carving-part-2/feed/ 3 http://dlwoodworks.com/furniture/building-a-coffee-table-with-3d-carving-part-1/ http://dlwoodworks.com/furniture/building-a-coffee-table-with-3d-carving-part-1/#comments Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:36:38 +0000 Don http://dlwoodworks.com/?p=1563 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 relief 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.  My wife and I both 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.

Wood for top

Top glueup

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. (www.vectric.com) to do all of my modeling for this table.  This is a very powerful design package that can also be used to create 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.

Table table final preview

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 out.  There was a lot of playing with the depth 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, I took the clamps off and used the CNC’s vacuum hold down to complete the texturing 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.

Don

Business Sign

This customer relocated from a high-visibility downtown office to a home office in the country and they wanted the ability to grab the attention of people as they drove by their new location.  We focused on making the business logo prominent that would grab people’s attention so they would want to know more and get the phone number to call for an appointment.  The large carved 3D logo does exactly that.

As the sign was being put up, people were stopping and looking and commenting on how it really did attract their attention where they wanted to call and get more information.  That is the true purpose of a business sign – get potential customers to want to call you and know more about your products and services.

This particular sign is made from western red cedar and uses special outdoor paints and sealers to make sure it will last a long, long time.

If you, or someone you know, is in need of an attention grabbing sign for your business, give us a call and we can work together to achieve your goals.

Thanks,

Don

Before going to the Fairgrounds we had spent about 30 minutes at home playing with a CAD program to figure out the best way to lay out our booth.  We got it all set up according to our plan and life was good.  We finished up early enough to get some errands run in the big city before the vendor party got underway.  We did some strolling around the venue to see what the other vendors were showing.  There was some very neat stuff there.  Well we went to the party and had a good time talking with some very nice folks and finally decided it was time to go home and get some sleep before the big show began.

Display Booth setup

Friday morning rolled around and we arrived for our first day at a real builders show.  Things started out

Prospective Customers

pretty slow and didn’t get much better for the entire day.  We found out that there had been a home & garden show the previous weekend and people were kinda burned out on shows.  So we hung in there and came back on Saturday morning for our 10 hours in the booth…..

One thing we did learn Friday (and luckily had time to fix) was that our booth was not really setup well.  We had it set up so that people had to come to the back of the booth to get brochures and business cards and look through the photo book.  Part way through the day we rearranged our booth and things were much better.  On Saturday and Sunday the new booth setup made a difference. It was a very busy day with lots of people coming in to talk with us about

Time for a Thumb War

their plans for their homes.  It was a great time to chat with people.  We had another great addition on Saturday and Sunday, one of our 12 year old twin daughters spent the two days with us at the show.  When things were a little slow we had time to chat and play games.

Professional Pen layout

Another great thing about having her with us was that she laid out our free pens very professionally – especially considering that we just put them in a pile.

Sunday was another VERY slow and boring day.  We had a few people that were just looking but that was it.  All our ‘business’ was done Saturday.  We blame the weather. It was sunny and 76 degrees outside.  People didn’t want to be cooped up inside at a show.  I don’t blame them at all – I would have loved to have been outside myself.  Oh well…..

All in all it was a pretty good experience.  We met some very nice people, learned a little more about how to set up a booth more efficiently for customer access and networked with some nice business people.  Nancy had a great time chatting with other scrollers when they came through the booth and saw the scroll saw work that she does.  I talked with several veterans and we had some nice chats.  I also got a chance to talk with many woodworkers and we exchanged good ideas and war stories.

We are looking forward to next year!

Click on an image to see a full size picture.

With the carving part of the mantle done, we now know what size our frame needs to be.  The frame is made up of 3 ‘sandwiches’

Airplane wing construction method

of 1/2″ plywood boxes.  This is the same method used to construct an airplane wing.  It is a honeycomb of structural members covered by a thin layer.  The fireplace mantle ‘sandwiches’ were made using this same technique.  The center box is where the carving is mounted to. The top box and bottom box provide the proper support and spacing to attach the crown molding which brings depth and dimension to the mantle.  Once each layer was constructed the next step is to join them all together and get them aligned properly so that the crown molding will line up properly.  This process is not difficult, just time consuming.  Once all aligned the boxes are glued and screwed together so they are very strong and will handle the mechanism used to hang the mantle on the wall.

Top glue up

The next step was to prepare the top by edge gluing solid wood to plywood to form the exact size we wanted for the top.

Next we started finishing the carving by first coating it with a clear finish.  For this mantle our base coat was amber shellac sprayed on to ensure a very even and smooth finish to apply the coloring stain to the animals to make them stand out from the background.

Staining takes a few days because we use an oil based gel stain that needs to dry overnight.  The next day we will rub the stain using nylon pads of different grits to get the desired result.  Then we will

Mantle scene during staining

apply more coats of stain rubbing it out between each coat.  For this mantle this process took about 5 days to complete.  For the deer we started with a dark stain and then rubbed most of it off leaving just what was left in the cracks and grooves. Then we applied successively lighter and light colors rubbing each out to get the desired effect.

Once we got the coloring just where we wanted it, we started the assembly process.  First step is to attach the bottom box to the center box.  This creates the shelf for the bottom crown molding to attach to.  Next step attaches the top box to the assembly completed in the first step.  We now have the mantle infrastructure put together to attach the top and the crown molding.

The final step is to apply several coats of semi-gloss lacquer – in our case we applied 7 coats to these mantles.

Mantle gluing the top on

Mantle dry assembly

Mantle crown molding installed

We finished the project with two mantels built.  One of the mantels is made from hickory and features a ranching scene carved into the face.  The second mantel is built from alder and features a wildlife deer and cougar scene.  The each measure about 50″ wide by 12″ tall by 12″ deep.

All in all we were pleased with how the mantels turned out and there has been a lot of interest by rustic furniture stores and fireplace stores to display them for customers.

Hickory carved ranch scene mantle

Alder carved deer scene mantel

Maple Night Stands

Solid maple craftsman style nightstands with dovetailed drawers and solid construction will ensure that these nightstands will last a lifetime.

Click on an image to see a larger picture.

Oak Entertainment Center

A traditional Oak Entertainment Center with pocket doors and component shelves for your entertainment system. The TV armoire will hold a TV up to 34″ in size. The drawer is sized for DVD’s, CD’s and videos. There is additional storage behind the lower doors making this a very useful storage cabinet as well as TV entertainment center. The TV wall unit is made from American made plywood and red oak. There was no particle board or pressboard used so you have to be worried about moving this piece around and having it fall apart.

Click on an image to see a larger picture.

Church Office Cabinets

Beautiful oak office cabinets turn this unused portion of the church office into a plethora of storage space. The cabinets feature full extension drawers and solid wood arched raised panel doors which add a level of class to the cabinets. The full height cabinet is used for holding their audio/video equipment for the church. The top on the base cabinets went through a process of having filler applied to ensure that it is very smooth for being able to write on. Normally oak has to much grain to make an effective writing surface. ]]> http://dlwoodworks.com/cabinetry/church-cabinets/feed/ 33