Around the World Table

With a great big lab of equipment at Big Heart and no coffee table at home, I took to the drawing board to push the limits on what I could create using a cutting table. I really liked the idea of a giant map somewhere in my apartment and thought this would be the perfect spot. I found a map online that wasn't too detailed, made some modifications in Illustrator, and threw a big slab of cheap wood on the Kongsberg. Our Kongsberg came equipped with a mill allowing us to cut through many types of material. I did 1 pass of a 6mm bit and a touch-up pass with a 3mm bit. After a bit of sanding, we ended up with this:

From there, I took a screen shot of the tool path created on ESKO's Kongsberg software. I put this into Illustrator and recreated the exact dimensions I had just milled out. We then overlapped a picture of all the world flags combined and a picture of rustic hardwood. Once we had that image created we added registration marks (small black dots) around the outside of the image so the machine knows where the image is. Then I printed the picture out on a giant poster using a Wide Format Printer in our lab. Then I took the poster back to the Kongsberg where I was able to cut the exact dimensions of the milled out map out of the poster leaving me a background for the map. I wanted the table to to have a clean, flat finish so I cut out a piece of acrylic the shape of the table and used some tiny clamps to keep it all together. The steps looked like this:

You might think I'd be done, but I didn't want any ordinary table legs. I wanted custom engraved "worldly" table legs. I thought world landmarks could create a cool image so I scraped the internet for simple looking landmarks. Then came the creative part: combining them into one beautiful, seamless image. Then through a process of guess, check, and modify I made it so the details of the image could be cut out using a 3mm bit. This meant drastically changing every image from the facial expression of the Easter Island Dummies to the width between the statue of liberty crown edges. I then painted some wood and threw it on the Kongsberg. While it turned out pretty good, it still took hours of sanding/extaco knifing the details to get it just right. The assembly job was a little odd, but using some formations I found online we were able to create a pretty sturdy table from just a few additional 2 x 4's and some screws.