In our TV room, two empty picture hooks hung above the entertainment center since we moved into this place. As part of my continuing effort to de-blank some of the walls in the house I decided to put up a map.
Why a map? Well, maps do a really good job of filling unused wall space. They can be made to be any size you need, they are interesting to look at, and they are generally tone-neutral. Years ago I salvaged a discarded nautical map and built a frame for it. It now hangs above my wife’s desk in her office. The map works there and I was pretty sure one would work above the TV as well.
Around the time I was thinking about exactly what kind of map to put up in the TV room I started playing through one of the Lost Treasures of Infocom titles and I came to my decision pretty quickly: I would recreate the Great Underground Empire map from Zork I. This iOS app has all the stuff you would have found in the box in these 27 original games including rotatable 3-D images of the “feelies” (non-paper stuff that came in the the box as well as the box itself), maps, the manual, and even the InvisiClues! So, if you were born while the Apollo Program was still a thing and much of this paragraph isn’t simply gibberish to you, check it out. Activision did a good job with this.
After looking the maps over, I felt that straight up copying them wouldn't work for a couple of reasons. First, the original maps are broken up over three separate pages (the area in and around the House, the Maze, and the entire rest of the Empire), and each of those pages is a vastly different scale than the others. Second, the maps are arranged more for a portrait form factor and the area where the map would hang was landscape. Finally, a direct transcription of the maps seemed a little “on the nose”, I guess, and the whole thing would have been less of a woodworking project and more of a photocopying exercise.
Still, I wanted to be as faithful as possible to the idea of the original maps so I kept the relative room shapes and sizes the same and, of course, the paths between the map regions all lead to and from the right places.
In the original maps you see a lot of “To Forest 3” or “To Grating Room” - the authors needed to do this to keep the maps easy to follow across three sub-regions, especially if the rooms were quite far away (on paper, anyway). Since that would result in a huge amount of finely printed text - way finer than my wood burning tool was capable of and certainly more detailed than I was willing to shoot for in this project - I decided that I would use direct pathways with as few crossover points as possible instead. The regions themselves and some of the connecting rooms needed to be shuffled to accommodate this strategy, and some of the path lengths needed to get from one place to another became very long, but I think the overall scheme worked out ok.
Like I implied, I used a wood burning tool for all of the paths and all of the writing you see in the pics in this post, but that wasn't always the plan. Originally, I wanted the paths to be copper to match the nail heads in each of the corners of the rooms because I thought it would look cool. It certainly looked cool in my head, but the idea simply did not manifest itself well in the real world. The metal-to-wood bonds were messy, the copper would not cut straight, the paths would curl up and each one needed to be weighted down so the glue could set, the turns looked sloppy (even by my standards), and sealing the map would have shredded any brush I used.
I did about 30 room-to-room paths before dejectedly deciding to try and remove the copper. If I couldn’t do it, I would just deal with it and slog through the best I could. I got lucky, though, and most of the traces came up without too much trouble - just an ugly residue left over. By using a quarter-inch circular ridged stamp attachment on the wood burning tool I was able to scorch the dried glue away fairly easily resulting in a stepping-stone type path for most of the room-to-room linkages. It looked ok, so I kept with that method where it was appropriate to do so. The only places where I used a finer tip for the paths were the maze rooms, the Strange Passage linkage, and the link from the Kitchen to the Studio.
I made the frame out of oak, and, like most things, it took a heck of a lot more time to create the jig for doing the job safely and nicely than it did to actually dado 1/4-inch slots into the frame members. The background is made from a 2’ by 4’ sheet of oak plyboard which governed the size of the map as much as the size of the blank wall space did. However, plyboard of any type was not going to work since that stuff gets super splintery when cutting against the grain and I had hundreds of cuts to make. I wanted something other than oak to make the rooms stand out a bit, grain-wise. Based of cost and availability, I ended up with two choices for the rooms - aspen or balsa. After experimenting a little with cuts, sanding, staining, and etching things into some test pieces with a wood burning tool the balsa came out the clear winner.
The balsa had the extra benefit of being soft enough to push copper nail-heads through without pre-drilling. The nails were used to give the room labels a bit more visual appeal and also give them the appearance of being mounted to a plyboard that way (they are actually glued there). The less said about the tediousness and the hand-crampiness of chopping the heads off hundreds and hundreds of copper-coated steel nails with a pair of side cutters, the better.
After the rooms were glued in place and the paths were made
there was still a lot of “white space” to fill. I wasn’t too sure what to do about that. I toyed with the idea of duplicating the legends from the original maps but that would have required me to differentiate between narrow passages, one-way passages, etc. Instead I took the rest of the balsa, cut it into various sized squares and rectangles, stained the pieces slightly darker than the rooms, and glued them into place as a space-fillers that look very much like elements in a rock wall. Perfect for an Underground Empire.
The whole thing was sealed this afternoon with a semi-gloss poly and is now drying in the garage. The whole project took about 25 hours to do and it looks pretty good sitting on the sawhorses in the garage. A couple of days from now (after it has finished drying and outgassing) I will hang it above the TV.
If it looks good I think I will do some more maps of this type, but next time on raw canvas or parchment paper. We will see.
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