Drift Wood Reformed

Using the 123DCatch tool by Autodesk, the physical object was translated into an editable 3D file.

Using the flow command in rhino, the natural curvature of the wood was removed to create a straitened form. This transformation was only possible with digital tools.

To help better understand the shape of the wood, the model was sliced into equal width cross sections. This was the form of the object we chose to 3D print.

The 3D printed cross section pieces allowed us to understand the volumes and contours of specific parts within the driftwood.

Using two of the cross contours, we traced the shape of the wood onto a small block of basswood, and using the hand chisels attempted to loft a 3D form between the two.
We used the initial photographs of the wood as well as the rendering to help inform the texture that was created with the chisel.

Returning to the digital model, we created six orthographic abstractions of the driftwood’s shape and grain.

We laser cut the templates, and traced them onto a new block of basswood.

For the next hand-tooled object, the templates were placed on the wood block, and the object was hand chiseled to reflect those markings. The pencil lines representing the grain of the wood in each of the orthographic views were left raised, thereby recreating a grain similar to the original artifact.

In an additional iteration, the templates were again traced onto a block of wood. The outlines of the traced shapes were used as guides to cut out a rough form on the bandsaw. The resulting shape was gestural and reflective of the grain of the original wood, but very square. The laser cut templates were again traced onto the sides of the wood form, and as in the previous object, served as guides for hand-chiseling. Leaving the markings as raised areas we were able to reproduce the direction and ow of grain as true to the original object.

In creating this more gestural artifact we used a band saw to reveal the form from out of a block of wood. The following photos show the resulting cuts to the bock of wood. Each cut can be viewed as the inverse of an extrude command in CAD.