Long Island Sound 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.
Long Island Sound in laser-cut Baltic birch, 13.5 by 31 inches: the whole urban sea between Connecticut and Long Island, over a hundred miles of it, carved one depth contour per layer.
More than eight million people live within sight of this water, and it still behaves like open ocean when it wants to. The Sound fills and drains through fierce tidal gates at its eastern end, The Race and Plum Gut, where the current runs hard enough to stand waves against the wind, and every sailor between Greenwich and Orient has a story about getting the timing wrong. On the chart, the deep glacial trench runs the Sound's length in descending layers of birch, with the harbor-notched Connecticut shore facing the barrier sweep of Long Island's north side.
Contours are laser-cut sheet by sheet, stacked by hand, and engraved, with acrylic glass over the relief and a solid Baltic birch frame in Dark or Light.
Every harbor on both shores thinks of the Sound as theirs. This chart settles it: it belongs to whoever reads the tide right.
The engraving runs from the East River's approach past Norwalk, Bridgeport, and New Haven, across to Port Jefferson and Oyster Bay, out to Orient and the gates. Zoom in at either end with the West Long Island chart or the East Long Island Sound chart.
- 13.5 × 31 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