Whale Vector Art

[Joe Wood]

I took this photo of whale rafter tails, a long time ago thinking how creative it looked and that I might do something similar one day.
WhaleRaftTail-Res.jpg

Whale-Rafter-Tail-Res.jpg

Well I'm ready, and have a good CNC shop I work with, but I can't find the 2d vector art I'll need, anyone have any ideas where I could look?

[Mike Heidrick]

Not following what you are looking for exactly? Are you saying they will CNC the ends of your rafters?? This looks like a template, jigsaw, and routerbit project and the template you or they should be able to draw very quickly.

[james mcgrew]

IMG_4572.JPGwhale.JPG
i thought is was a great idea,, when you get ready come on back and we will show you how to do it !!

people do all kinds of stuff you will only be limited by your imagination !!

[Joe Wood]

Yeah you're right Mike, I can also cut them myself with a template (only have 8 of them to do), it's just that I have no drawing skills at all so that's why I need a good vector drawing to make the template.

I do have Corel photo paint, and Corel Draw but don't really know how to use them for something like this.

[Jerome Stanek]

I would cut a template and use a router with a template bit to cut them

[Jim Underwood]

Joe, in what format do you need that 2D file?

[Joe Wood]

.. Never thought I'd be drawing Whales with my SketchUp :-)

whale-1.jpg

whale-2.jpg

apparently all I really need is a good jpg 2d image, of a real creative sperm whale outline that I can trace over in SUp! I think I can also use gif and png files.

That's what I've been doing CNC wise, is exporting full sized dxf files from SUp, and those are the templates the cnc shop uses to cut my pieces. Here are some curved rafters and the cnc machine.

cnc-rafters.jpg

I need to fine tune the whale onto the rafter anyway! This one I've traced is pretty close already :-)

[Joe Wood]

So this turned out pretty nice :-) Can you see the whales?

5San-Diego-Arbor.jpg

7Whale-Rafters.jpg

8Whale-Rafter-Tail.jpg

They be gray whales :-)

I ended up having my CNC guy cut me the templates, one for the whale, and one for the tail outline, then used my router.

Glued up two pieces of KD vg 1x4" wr cedar for stability.

15.jpg

9Custom-Rafters.jpg

Not my grandest project by far but sure was fun!

you can see more here http://woodsshop.com/DESIGNS/San-Die...-And-Arbor.htm

[David Warkentin]

Looks good!

[Mark Smith61]

Looks nice, but the CNC could have cut them too. At least my Legacy could have done those, and could have even added some detail to the surface of the whale too if you wanted.

[Joe Wood]

Yeah but I was a bit concerned with the cnc blowing out the grain in spots, that's why I did it myself. Plus that was part of the fun with this one :-)

Mark, what type of surface detail are you talking about??