Wooden depth chart

The finished product

I thought it would be fun to re-create something along the lines of http://www.belowtheboat.com for an area they don't have on offer.

Many hours creating the plans...

I got my hands on a high-resolution scan of a nautical chart of the area I had in mind (Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland). Then I used Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org) to manually add all the depth contour lines.

A couple of weeks later

I sent the plans off to a guy with a laser cutter large enough to cut the 3mm plywood in the dimensions I specified (approx. 120cm x 70cm, that's 47" x 27").
He did both the cutting (removing the parts of wood I didn't need) and the engraving (roads, place names, navigational aids, etc.)
Apologies for the poor image quality on this one.

Testing water-based blue stain

Using the unneeded cut-outs from the second-to-last layer to test the colour.

Staining the base layer

I had the laser-cutter also laser-engrave the cut-out lines from the layer above, so I would know where I needed to stain the wood (and where to glue later on)

The next layer

Staining the next layer...

Some green stain for the tidal areas

Putting the collection to good use

Glueing something as large as this is tricky. I don't have clamps large enough to reach into the center of the chart, so I put my collection of (mostly) single malts to good use instead.

Glueing additional layers...

Finished product (details)