Jim Morrison Silhouette Art

Acknowledgements

Tom Lutz and John Difrancesco for helping me with the Shop Bot way after the scheduled time and for answering all of my surely idiotic questions. He is the master of those machines.

Related Links

Jim Morrison - Wikipedia
The Doors

“I believe in a long, prolonged, derangement of the senses in order to obtain the unknown.”

- Jim Morrison
I was going to mill the famous picture “Scream” in pressed particle board, but the material is absolutely the worst possible. Splinters go everywhere and it chips off in large chunks. Originally, I planned to use the shop bot to cut 6 different depths in the wood, each representing a color of gray, hoping the work of art “Scream” would become clear. Unfortunately, the depths didn’t create enough shading to become easily visible.

Instead, I now decided to mill Jim Morrison in the wood. I pulled a photo of Jim Morrison’s famous album cover and ran it through photoshop. I then exported to .eps. Down in the shop, I imported the .eps in to Rhino because it wouldn’t open in the Shop Bot’s software. Once in there, I edited it slightly, and reexported to .dxf, a format enjoyed more by the Shop Bot.

Jim was then ready to mill. I screwed down the board to the sacrificial layer, and using a .25″ square bit, started milling the board. About halfway through, the bit came loose and started milling through my material and into the sacrificial layer. I didn’t catch it immediately because the machine was milling in circles. I hit the emergency stop and had to start over. I flipped the material around, rescrewed it and tightened the bit. After hitting start, 30 minutes later, Jim was done. Problem was, you couldn’t see him. As a last ditch effort to make this look good, I spray painted the inside by hand, planning to sand it down later, leaving paint only in the milled area. But after taking a look at the intermediate product, I decided I liked the grunge look and left it alone. Take a look at the images for some more details.