Combine manual carving with CNC machining
Traditional workshop applies CNC to create religious art
The Arte Salmerón home page, with a few works of art that they created
Taller de Arte Salmerón S.L. is a traditional Spanish family workshop, founded in 1970, specialized in the creation, manufacturing, and restoration of sacred and religious art. The website shows many examples of their achievements, from small to very large.
Since a few years Arte Salmerón uses CNC machining as one of their tools. The DeskProto software proved to be a perfect CAM program for their application.
Rendering (CAD-drawing) of the altarpiece to be created.
The centre of every Roman Catholic church is the altar: a table where the Sacrifice of the Mass is celebrated. Behind this altar you can find the altarpiece: a work of art (painting, sculpture, relief, ...) of a religious subject.
Arte Salmerón's services include the creation of new altarpieces. From their website: "In our workshop, we carry out the design, the iconographic study and the construction of altarpieces, from simple niches to main altarpieces."
One of their current projects is a new altarpiece for the Cathedral of Panama, to be delivered next year. The image above shows the design of this new altarpiece. As you can see many reliefs and small sculptures are present, to be carved in wood. This is where DeskProto proves its value. This page focuses on one of these sculptures: the capital that is placed on top of each pillar. A complex design, with many floral details.
DeskProto screen video, showing the four sides and the toolpaths for roughing and finishing.
Arte Salmerón used the Zbrush CAD software to design this capital, and then exported the geometry as STL file. This geometry is ideal for indexed machining: machine each of the four sides using plain 3-axis toolpaths, and use a fourth axis to rotate the block 90 degrees in-between the sides. DeskProto includes a wizard to make indexed machining easy: the wizard "Two or mode sides, automatic rotation". See the Wooden corbel tutorial video.
Roughing has been done using a 16 mm diameter flat cutter, for finishing a long tapered cutter has been used, with a 3 mm ball tip.
CNC machining: you see the finishing cutter removing the thick roughing skin.
The CNC machine has been made by CNC Bárcenas (Spain). As you can see it can very well handle parts of this size. The material for this capital is linden wood: the fine and even grain makes it well suited for carving intricate sculptures like this capital.
At Arte Salmerón CNC machining is the first step: when it comes from the machine the capital will be manually carved as well, in order to add finer details.
One of the capitals, finished by applying gold leaf.
When all carving has been done the capitals are finally finished with gold leaf. Therefore they are primed first, after which the gold leaf is applied. Which for this freeform geometry is not easy and needs a skilled craftsman. The result surely is dazzling!