Textile heritage motifs to decorative furniture surfaces. Transpose process and analysis

Abstract

Contemporary digital technologies offer the possibility to preserve the ancestral motifs and symbols and pass them on to the next generations. These databases can be used not only for traditional crafts and heritage conservation, but also for modern applications, including furniture, making the national/universal heritage to be worldwide known and appreciated. This paper presents a method to valorise in furniture surface decoration two symbolic traditional motifs collected from textile clothes originated from a central region of Transylvania. For this purpose a digital reproduction software, a computer-aided design and a simulation software of the Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) router milling process were used, investigating two methods of processing wood materials with two types of tools. Based on the theoretical approach, an experimental plan was set based on Taguchi full factorial design of experiment for four factors and two levels, including two digitized traditional motifs, two types of furniture raw materials (oak wood and medium density fibreboard-MDF), two tools angled at 90° and 120° and two processing methods (Engrave and V-Carve). The replicates of the traditional motifs processed by CNC router on furniture materials were afterwards visually analysed from the aesthetic point of view and then were subjected to an ImageJ analysis for objective calculation of the processed area for all variants. The analysis was combined with the processing time indicated by the simulation software for each variant. The results showed that transposing the motifs on surfaces, depends not only on the tool characterstics, but also on the material. Processing the motifs on MDF was more accurate than on wood. From all variants, engraving with the 120° tool seemed the best compromise between motif appearance and processing time.