CNC Cheeseboard

Every ridge and valley of the Topatopa mountains is there — you can trace the peak above my parents' house with your finger while you reach for the cheese.

My parents' house feels perched on a mountaintop. What I didn't fully grasp until this project was that the range behind them dwarfs their mountain so completely that it barely registers as a bump above the valley floor. I wanted to make something that held that humbling context in your hands — a piece where scale speaks quietly, and where the act of sharing food becomes a small meditation on land, place, and how small we are in it.

I used TouchTerrain — a free web tool from Iowa State — to generate a 3D model from the GPS coordinates of their home. After decimating the mesh in Blender from 70MB to 2MB to keep my CNC software from crashing, I designed two toolpaths: a roughing pass (~5 hrs) to remove bulk material, and a finishing pass with a 1/100" stepover distance to capture the fine ridgeline detail. The first iteration of this was done on a scaled-down cheaper piece of wood so that I could learn the tools and decrease the chances that my chunk of walnut would be ruined. When the first iteration came out well, I brought my walnut block the shop.

We devised a way to hold it in place using a L-shaped corner clamps and a lever-and-nail tensioning rig. Total machine time: ~12 hours. Final steps were hand-chiseling misaligned edges, fine-grit sanding to remove grain fuzz, and a butcher block conditioner that transformed the raw surface. Start to finish: about 24 hours.