Outer Banks, North Carolina 3D Wood Map | Laser-Cut Birch Nautical Chart
How the Water Becomes Wood
A chart is a stack of flat sheets until the water's real soundings tell it what shape to take.
- SurveyReal bathymetric sounding data sets every contour line before a single cut is made.
- CutEach depth band is laser-cut from its own sheet of Baltic birch, up to nine layers deep.
- StainWater layers are stained by hand, reading darker the deeper the water runs.
- StackThe sheets are registered and stacked in sequence, and the bed's true shape rises out of the wood.
- EtchDepths and place names are burned into the grain itself, never printed on it.
- FrameA solid Baltic birch frame and acrylic glass finish the piece, ready to hang.
The Outer Banks in carved relief: 13.5 by 43 inches of stacked Baltic birch holding the full barrier chain, its sounds, and its inlets, every depth contour a separate laser-cut layer.
The Banks are guarded by their lighthouses the way other coasts are guarded by geography, and the chart holds all three of the great ones in position: Bodie Island's horizontal bands, Hatteras's spiral at the elbow, Ocracoke's plain white tower on its harbor. North at Corolla, the wild horses, descendants of shipwrecked Spanish mustangs, still roam the four-wheel-drive beaches. And the inlets themselves are the islands' restless punctuation, opening and closing over the centuries as storms decide; Oregon Inlet did not exist before 1846. In the birch, the sounds' vast shallows lie behind the thin bright barrier line with each inlet's channel engraved through.
Contours are laser-cut sheet by sheet, stacked by hand, engraved, and finished behind acrylic glass in a solid Baltic birch frame in Dark or Light.
Horses at one end, Ocracoke ponies at the other, and a hundred miles of moving sand between.
The engraving spans Corolla to Ocracoke with the villages, lights, and inlets in place. Companions: the North Carolina Coast chart and the touchable Outer Banks UV map.
- 13.5 × 43 in
- Solid Baltic birch frame in Dark or Light
- Acrylic glass front, ready to hang
- Free next-business-day shipping on orders placed by 2 PM EST
- 14-day returns
Live from the water