By Carli Johnson STAFF WRITER<\/p>\n
For Benjamin Sands, Big Sky isn\u2019t just a favorite ski destination\u2014it\u2019s a place that has shaped his family\u2019s traditions for more than two decades.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s always been a place that I\u2019ve loved,\u201d said Sands, a junior at Upper Perkiomen High School in Pennsylvania. \u201cIt\u2019s been cool to see the place grow, and Bozeman grow, because we fly into Bozeman, and it started much smaller than it is now.\u201d<\/p>\n
This spring, Sands turned that connection into an ambitious woodworking project, creating a 47-by-24-inch relief map of Big Sky Resort\u2019s trail system using laser engraving, CNC machining and hand-filled epoxy resin. The project, completed through his school\u2019s X Lab program, took roughly three months to finish.<\/p>\n
The idea grew out of his family\u2019s long history in Big Sky.<\/p>\n
Sands said his grandfather first visited Big Sky during a business trip in the early 2000s and quickly fell in love with the area, prompting the family to purchase a home there before Sands was born.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy grandfather kind of fell in love with the place,\u201d Sands said. He first skied in Big Sky when he was four or five years old, and since then, it\u2019s become a yearly tradition. \u201cWe get out there in the winter a few times every year,\u201dSands said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The project also reflects the encouragement Sands found in the classroom.<\/p>\n
He credited his X Lab instructor, Dan Moyer, with helping students transform their ideas into reality.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s a great teacher,\u201d Sands said. \u201cHe\u2019s very good with us kids and making our ideas and our creativity come to life, which you don\u2019t really get in high school in a lot of other classes.\u201d<\/p>\n
After first creating a laser-cut Moonlight Basin logo, Sands decided to take on something much larger.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had this really cool idea,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is a huge trail map with so many trails and so many places that I feel like my family knows so well. I was like, \u2018Well, how can I do something in this class to kind of replicate that?’\u201d<\/p>\n
The first challenge was finding a piece of wood large enough for the project.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe somehow were able to find a piece of wood that was pretty much identical and only took very little trimming to get the size,\u201d Sands said of the 47-by-24-inch board he discovered in the school\u2019s shop.<\/p>\n
The first stage involved engraving the mountain\u2019s terrain using a Boss laser cutter before transferring the board to a CNC router, which carved each ski trail into the wood. The engraving alone took about 6 1\/2 hours, making it the largest project the school\u2019s laser cutter had ever handled.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe actually had to go in and delete, I think there was 180 old projects on there that were taking up memory,\u201d Sands said. \u201cWe had to delete all of them just for this to work.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next hurdle came when the trail file failed to line up correctly on the CNC machine, leaving more carving to be done later on.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt routed out the trails about half an inch low,\u201d Sands said. After several class periods troubleshooting the issue, Sands and Moyer corrected the alignment and moved on to what became the most painstaking phase of the project.<\/p>\n
Using colored epoxy resin and a syringe, Sands filled every ski trail by hand, matching Big Sky Resort\u2019s trail difficulty colors.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe hardest part was figuring out how to fill the trails without having the color overlap into the other trails,\u201d Sands said. To keep colors from bleeding, he inserted thin strips of styrofoam between adjacent runs before pouring the resin.<\/p>\n
The first solution created another problem.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I tried to take the styrofoam out, the styrofoam just broke off, and it was stuck in there,\u201d he said. After each color, Sands had to use a hand router to individually route out the rest of the styrofoam. The resin work ultimately consumed about two months of the three-month project.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was very time-consuming,\u201d Sands said.<\/p>\n
As a finishing touch, he laser-cut and painted a vintage-style Big Sky Resort logo, adding a black border to make the colors stand out.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe figured just the old-fashioned colors kind of fit the project,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Although the trail map began as a school assignment, Sands said it has become something much more personal. The completed piece will hang in his family\u2019s new home in Pennsylvania, a property where his father grew up and that the family has spent the past several years restoring.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s kind of just a place that we all love,\u201d Sands said. Like the Pennsylvania home, the Big Sky map preserves a piece of the Sands family history. \u201cWe always had these ideas of making it how it used to be for my dad, but putting a modern twist on it. They always had pictures and signs hung up and flags, so I thought this would be a perfect fit for our family.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Carli Johnson STAFF WRITER For Benjamin Sands, Big Sky isn\u2019t just a favorite ski destination\u2014it\u2019s a place…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240371,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-240370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}