Once upon a time, we were given the opportunity to theme MultiCam Western Canada’s boardroom. The boardroom was the central showpiece for their offices, tech centre and showroom. The room was designed as a marketing tool — showcasing the power and versatility of MultiCam’s CNC machines in an engaging way. In this series of posts, we will take you through the construction of this one of a kind project.
This video will give you a taste of the finished product and also talks a little bit about the philosophy behind our design.
As you can see, the boardroom has a nautical theme and standing in the room feels a little bit like standing inside a steampunk submarine.
When we bought our first MultiCam CNC router, we were determined not to use it as a jigsaw! In fact, we use our machine almost exclusively for dimensional work. We made an exception for this particular project when we designed the “iron” ribs that line the boardrooms walls. We used 3/4” flat stock MDF and cut out shapes which will be glued up and assembled later.
As always, we built the cutting files in EnRoute. Every measurement was critical in order to fit perfectly into a room that was already built. We threw sheet after sheet onto the router and let the machine do its work. We had hoped we could assemble the pieces as they came off the machine but, in the end, we had our work cut out for us just keeping the machine fed!
Each rib (actually each quarter rib) was made up from eight separate pieces. They fit together perfectly and a little hand work with a die grinder added texture to the edges and rounded the outside corners. We used some paintable acrylic caulking to round the inside corners. Next we added a generous coat of Coastal Enterprises FSC-88-WB primer. “WB” stands for water based. This primer has the consistency of heavy cream and, when it is brushed on, it leaves random brush strokes that create a nice texture. (FSC-88-WB goes by the nickname “marshmallow paint” in our shop.) After we apply our rusting paint these ribs will look like they have been cast in iron.
As with all of our large projects, the nautical boardroom had taken over the shop. We decided to mock the boardroom up and see how everything fit together. The tops of the heavy, “cast iron,” arches are still imaginary — but even with the missing pieces you can begin to see how the boardroom will look.
You can learn more about other parts of this project by following these links: