The Wall

Yesterday was my brother’s an my 16th birthday. We are both huge Pink Floyd fans so I decided to make him this gift. I recreated an image from the Pink Floyd album: The Wall, into a real, wooden 3-D picture. It took somewhere between 35 and 45 hours to complete (I didn’t keep close count) over one week. The entire thing is made from two sheets of birch plywood; one for the backing and one for the front. It measures a few inches shorter then 8’ by 4’. So here are the details about this project: The image of the brick wall with the face coming out is composed of 2000 wooden bricks. Yeah, there are a lot of bricks in this wall. It is 50 bricks tall and 40 bricks long. You may be thinking: “Okay,so, 50×40 is 2000 bricks, but what about the hole for the mouth were there are no bricks” Well, all the bricks that would have been used for the area of the mouth were stacked around the side of the mouth to add a deeper effect. There are also 250+ shims that allow the face to come 4” out of the wall at the highest point. The shims rang in sizes from 1/16” – 3/4”. To make the 2000 bricks, I crosscut the plywood into strips that were the width of the bricks, I then made a sled for my table saw to cut eight bricks out of those strips in each pass. After the bricks were cut to dimension, all the edges were chamfered with a sander to make them look individual when they were glued back together. I did 400 bricks at a time (cut then sand).

Then the challenging part arrived; arranging them properly to create the wall. I constantly checked the rows for squareness and straitness. I was not going to let it slip away on me. Then the really challenging part came: Shimming them up in correct increments to create a face. All of the bricks were glued to the back board as they were placed. Once the bricks were done and glued, it was painting time. I started by giving the entire thing 4 coats of white spray paint. Next I did the black (spray paint), which was risk free because if I messed up and made a spot too black, I would just add more white to that spot once the black dried.Then I did the red mouth, which brought it to life. I then hand painted the writing to top it off. I finished it with 3 coats of transparent spray lacquer.

Here are the pictures of the process:

He was extremely surprised and happy with the gift, and we plan to mount it on the wall in his room. My mom had the great idea of making it the headboard of his king-sized bed, which would be awesome, if he didn’t have two windows behind his bed. I told him that I might make one for myself in a while ( I have no desire of doing this all again any time soon) and he said he would help me so it would go faster. So mabey in a while you might be seeing another one.

Thanks for taking a look,

Ryan

-- Ryan