Hayden Riddiford
Firmware + Electrical Engineer
Corkthulu
An ocean inspired wine rack.
Inspiration
My sister's birthday was coming up in a couple of months, and I'd been meaning to try out my community workshop's (Dallas Makerspace) laser cutter for a while. I figured I would incorporate the laser cutter into whatever present I made for her. On lower power settings, the laser cutter turns into an automated wood burning tool. This lets you create extremely intricate vector art on your computer, and easily transfer it to wood. Since my sister's favorite animal is the octopus, I was inspired to make some sort of octopus themed present. Given it was her 21st birthday, a wine rack seemed appropriate.
Physical Construction
To start, I found a stock image that loosely matched the idea I had in my head of an octopus wrapping itself around a couple of wine bottles. After I found that image, the physical design followed shortly after. For a while I tossed around the idea of a single piece of wood holding and supporting the wine bottles, but decided to go with the multi-piece approach both for practical purposes as well as more opportunities to use the laser cutter. The general idea was pretty simple: two panels with holes in it for wine bottles, and some support boards holding everything together. I decided that the support boards should be joined via thumb screws and threads rather than permanently affixed. While masterfully joined supports may look cleaner, this way it's easy to assemble/disassemble the wine rack for shipping, and the shell thumb screws ended up looking pretty darn cool.
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In terms of the wood-working aspect of the project, all wood used in the project is pine. After the octopus image was burned into two different square panels of wood, I used a band saw to round out the edges. For the wine bottle holes, I cut these out by hand using a scroll saw. Each support is simply a square length of wood with screw threads mounted in them. After engraving a panel with all the thumb screw shells, each shell was cut out using a scroll saw. Although somewhat tedious, cutting out the thumb screws this way made it so that each shell has a cool, scalloped edge. After all individual pieces were complete, they were finished with a couple coats of shellac.
Laser Engraved Art
The laser cutter I was using supported bitmap (.bmp) images, where you assigned different RGB values to represent different laser intensities. I wanted to do a simple, single intensity wood burning, which meant any bitmap images I used had to be entirely black and white. All engravings on the wine rack started as stock vector art found on the internet. Using Paint.net, I modified them to be inputs to the software the laser cutter used. The octopus is the most heavily modified image. I had to adjust/redraw most of the tentacles to allow for large enough wine bottle gaps. Because the octopus is on both sides of the wine rack, the image had to be horizontally mirrored for the second side so that it lined up with the first. The top two supports feature a vector art rendering of The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese artist Hokusai. A "sea floor" scene is found on the bottom support, and the thumbscrews are all laser burned with sea-shell vector art.