Home workshops today turn out a lot more than birdhouses. Wired asked four makers to describe how they’ve mastered four very different materials.

The Material: Wood
It’s the oldest hobbyist’s medium, but computer routing can make it new.

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.—Cameron Bird

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1 Optimize the source data.
On the heightmaps, each altitude is represented by a different color. Using a free open source tool called SpringMapEdit, I export the heightmap as an 8-bit grayscale image, either a JPG or a bitmap. There are 256 shades of gray and therefore 256 possible elevations—the darker the shade, the deeper the CNC drills. In Photoshop, I adjust the levels to boost the contrast, so the darkest grays are pitch-black and the lightest ones are pure white. That makes the machine more likely to pick up all the fine gradations in height.

For the complete how-to, visit wrdm.ag/moontable.

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