Skateboarder Rob Dyrdek orders solid gold necklace made from his old shoes. Los Angeles, CA-based Deviant Design Group creates custom jewelry designs for high profile personalities in the entertainment industry. Their work represents the definition of deviant: departing from usual or accepted standards, achieving diversity through controversy.
 Exact replicas to 1/10 scale of all Skateboarder Rob Dyrdek's shoes strung together into a unique solid gold necklace. |
Recently, Deviant Design Group President Mark Barata was contacted by professional skateboarder Rob Dyrdek in early 2006 with an idea for a custom jewelry piece. Dyrdek, who has a signature line of shoes, wanted to make exact replicas to 1/10 scale of all of his shoes, and string them together into a unique solid gold necklace.
Barata tried using an artist to create a tiny version of each shoe, but the creations came up short in detail, complexity and accuracy. He needed a way to insure absolute fidelity to the design, down to the stitching.
Who Needs A Sculptor?Barata had heard of non-contact laser scanning, so he surfed the Internet and found the GKS website. After contacting Larry Carlberg at GKS, a division of Laser Design, in Minneapolis, MN, Barata was impressed with Carlberg’s knowledge and expertise. At first Barata sent only one shoe to be laser scanned with Laser Design’s high-speed, high-accuracy RPS-450 Laser Probe to see if the results lived up to his exacting standards. Carlberg used the RPS-450 because it has the best depth of field and accuracy of ±.002”.
Skateboarder Dyrdek only had one pair of each of his special shoes “archived” from the past collections, so he had to be sure that the scanning process would not ruin the shoes in any way. Since the laser scanning system projects a line of laser light onto surfaces while cameras continuously triangulate the changing distance and profile of the laser line as it sweeps along, the problem of marring the surface of or depressing the soft parts of the shoe was eliminated.
To get better quality data, Carlberg explained that they would use some powder on the surface to make it more readable by the laser, but other than that, the shoes would remain undamaged.
 One of Rob Dyrdek's shoes that offered many obstacles in replication. |
Once Barata saw the results of the first shoe’s scanning, he was sold. “The results were absolutely perfect, down to the laces, down to the thread on the shoes, and the pattern of the soles.”
The process continued until Carlberg had scanned all 14 shoe styles, which happened over the span of 3 1/2 months. Some areas of the shoes were more difficult to scan than others, for example, the laces and inside the shoe.
“Our expert technicians were able to develop a process using Geomagic to minimize the errors incurred by geometry that is not captured completely around, such as the laces and the back straps, so that the entire area is represented on the STL models made for the jeweler,” explains Carlberg.
 Rob's shoe after it had been scanned by GKS |
Small wax figurine rapid prototypes were then created for every shoe, from which a mold was made. From the tiny, precise, meticulous molds, solid gold shoes were cast, links were added to the toes and heels, and the 1 1/2” shoe charms were assembled into a necklace.“The whole project was fun, even when we had a couple of rush jobs,” says Mark Barata, president of Deviant Design. “Larry at GKS was a thorough professional, walking me through the scanning process step-by-step, no pun intended.
“Each shoe design posed slightly different challenges in capturing the details, but GKS laser scanning was the perfect solution. The data was very accurate and allowed us to create molds that were exact reproductions of the shoes themselves, which is what Rob Dyrdek, our client, wanted. Rob was absolutely thrilled with the results, and has worn the necklace on his MTV show Rob and Big as well as at an ESPN awards ceremony. The piece has also appeared on the cover of two magazines.”
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