The Rapoport Family Crest

The Rapoport Family Crest was a birthday present for my father.  Last year I chanced to stumble across a “Rapoport” wikipedia article, which contained the previously unknown image of the crest.

I took this image and brought it into Adobe Illustrator, where I used the Live Trace command to convert the highly-pixelized image to vector form.  I brought the vectors (linework) into Rhinoceros 4 and created a frame for the crest based on the contours of the image.  I then lofted surfaces from the edges of the image to fit the edge of the new frame.

I then exported my 3D model and milled it on the CMU Digital Fabrication Lab’s CNC Mill machine.  I purposely left legs, as I intended to align the frame the laser cutter to engrave the crest’s linework in the milled piece of MDF.

After milling I successfully aligned the lasercutter and engraved the image.  I then sanded the liner legs off and shellacked the entire project with water-based polyurethane.

And Viola!  The Crest!