I'm in the process of designing a steamer trunk with a curved top, kind of like a barrel. It'll be made from a number of thin boards around 3" thick, cut at an angle, then glues together. The outside will be sanded round while the inside will be left flat. There will be two supports on the underside for looks. This is going to be a wedding gift for my niece. The wife came up with the idea of using the CNC, which I'm not going to have until July, to do something on the underside of the lid on the flat boards. She suggested hearts but that's not really a guy thing.
So I've been trying to come with ideas. One thing they really like doing is skiing. So here's the question. How hard would it be to take an image of the ski trail map and split it up so the map can be large enough to fit on all the boards? What I was thinking is a V carving of just the trails (the white parts) split in half to fill the outside panels. That way I could do something like their names in the center panel. The V carvings could stop short of each board so if they didn't line up when glued together it wouldn't show. The top pic is just something I quickly glued up to see how I liked it. The second is what the underside of the lid will look like. The thin black lines are the glue joints and the thick black lines are the supports. The final picture is a trail map. The red line is where I would split it in half and the black lines are roughly where the glue joints would be.
I don't want to commit to something that's going to be too advanced for a novice to do. But it does seam like it could be a fun project. I was planning on using QSWO for this.
top.jpgtrunk.jpgtrails.jpg