April 21, 2011
Kenneth Barry, Lunar Coffee Table
Three years ago, Kenneth Barry was just an IT guy at a cabinet shop. But when his boss asked him to help the company go paperless, he went further, assembling a machine to automate what most woodworkers were doing by hand. His first CNC router was a crude hack, its design cribbed from somebody’s website, its frame cobbled together from a pile of plastic bathroom partitions. But it allowed the twentysomething dad to make his own custom furniture with just a few keystrokes. Soon he hit on a way to combine his 3-D modeling skills with one of his hobbies, the online strategy game Spring. His CNC, he realized, could take one of the game’s “heightmaps,” which hold the geospatial data for each level, and render it as a relief map in wood. His first attempt was uneven and choppy, so for his second he went all out and built a new router, knocking down a wall in his garage to accommodate the 10- by 8-foot beast. The mission was a success, landing him a one-of-a-kind coffee table with an eerie lunar surface.
Leave a Reply
