A few months back, I committed to designing and building a "somewhat large" intarsia project for our church.
The work will cover a significant portion of one of the entry area's (Narthex) walls - the resulting image will be 15' wide by 9'-3" high. For you math types - yes, that's very close to the golden rectangle.
The first picture shows the wall and the added left and right boundaries rendered onto it.
After about 2 months of discussions and rough drawings, the final blocking image was approved as shown. The image will depict seven of the many ministries that go on in the church.
First step - figure out how to construct a large integrated image that would consist of an estimated 2000-2500 individually cut and shaped pieces of wood.
I decided on using 3 panels on marine grade Baltic birch plywood as the substrates. Each panel comes as 5' x 10' so the lengths could be cut to the desired 111".
Each panel would have a "poor man's" torsion box frame and be moved about on a custom trolly.
The next step was to figure out how to physically handle such a large project in my small shop. Answer - there's no way. So my office/library became the assembly area - fortunately we have very high ceilings.
To get the panels through our doors, a pivot was added to allow the panels to be rotated 90 degrees. The pivot point was off centered to the panel to accommodate the caster height. See pictures.
After the trollies were built and panels attached, they were lined up on one wall of our great room and the rough blocking image was projected and traced onto the panels. While the actual scenes will all be detailed to much greater degree and will likely change from the blocking drawing, this gives a good overall perspective to work with. The panels were then rotated 90 degrees and wheeled into the office. Although all three panels can be lined up, it's pretty tight so I can work on two of them at a time and move the third aside.
More to come.
The work will cover a significant portion of one of the entry area's (Narthex) walls - the resulting image will be 15' wide by 9'-3" high. For you math types - yes, that's very close to the golden rectangle.
The first picture shows the wall and the added left and right boundaries rendered onto it.
After about 2 months of discussions and rough drawings, the final blocking image was approved as shown. The image will depict seven of the many ministries that go on in the church.
First step - figure out how to construct a large integrated image that would consist of an estimated 2000-2500 individually cut and shaped pieces of wood.
I decided on using 3 panels on marine grade Baltic birch plywood as the substrates. Each panel comes as 5' x 10' so the lengths could be cut to the desired 111".
Each panel would have a "poor man's" torsion box frame and be moved about on a custom trolly.
The next step was to figure out how to physically handle such a large project in my small shop. Answer - there's no way. So my office/library became the assembly area - fortunately we have very high ceilings.
To get the panels through our doors, a pivot was added to allow the panels to be rotated 90 degrees. The pivot point was off centered to the panel to accommodate the caster height. See pictures.
After the trollies were built and panels attached, they were lined up on one wall of our great room and the rough blocking image was projected and traced onto the panels. While the actual scenes will all be detailed to much greater degree and will likely change from the blocking drawing, this gives a good overall perspective to work with. The panels were then rotated 90 degrees and wheeled into the office. Although all three panels can be lined up, it's pretty tight so I can work on two of them at a time and move the third aside.
More to come.
