Background

Accsys Technologies is a public traded company traded on the stock exchange in London & Amsterdam. They have developed a product called Accoya, Accoya was originally a timber species from the Southern Hemisphere in particular from New Zealand and the timber in its original format is called Radiata pine. The timber is plantation grown & generally has wide growth rings, this as allowed the material to be the perfect timber to modify. It is valued on plantations for its fast growth & utility as both a source of construction lumber as well as wood pulp for the paper industry.

Accsys technologies are part of a major investor group who have taken fast growing radiata pine in its standard format and turned the timber from a traditional wood with all its susceptibilities to decay, movement & other defects associated to traditional timbers to a modified engineered piece of timber with a life time guarantee. It will not rot or twist when in contact with all extreme elements of normal day to day weather conditions.

The process of acetylation transforms hydroxyl groups to larger, inert acetyl groups, reducing water absorption of the cell wall. Acetylation merely changes the balance of naturally occurring chemicals in the wood.

Within the process only naturally occurring wood compounds are added to the wood, this makes the timber non toxic, fully recyclable. Acetylation changes the wood at the molecular level, this allows the timber to achieve the durability by stopping the rot fungi from digesting wood.

The Great Egg Adventure

Let the great egg adventure begin, we were approached by a company in Ireland (Abbey wood) who asked was we prepared to get involved in a project to sculpture a wooden egg for charity in New York. The project design sculpture had been designed by a London based Architectural practice Zap Architecture, it was designed by Architect Pol Gallagher. Clearly they had struggled to find anyone prepared or capable of producing such a delicate structure with its internal & external radius.

Not to turn our back on a challenge and with the deadline fast approaching we despatched our team of CAD designers to plot the sculpture, most of the design work took place in the evening & soon occupied every working hour. The challenge was to find a way to programme & sculpture the great egg, eventually cometh the hour our CAD designers and programmers found the solutions that enabled us to complete this journey. This has challenged our belief of taking wood engineering to a new dimension “as one of my designer said it has been egg-cellent challenge”.

The competition, which takes place each year in New York, was this year to be in aid of mental Health, which in our life’s will affect all of us directly or indirectly at some way, there was over 260 egg sculptures with eventually our egg sculpture fetching $3400.

All the design work has been carried out using Alpha cam & transferred to a 5 axis Maka CNC machine for processing.