The surface of a typical stringed instrument’s arched plate is a complex surface indeed.  Experienced plate carvers and first timers possessed of highly refined spatial perception tend to implement these with some ease, while for others even the prospect of rendering such a plate is just too intimidating.  This paper proposes a method by which the contours of such plates may be specified.  It is a step-by-step design approach which can yield a topographic contour specification such as found in topographic maps for a plate of arbitrary outline.  The resulting specification can be directly transferred to a plate blank which is then rough carved with a router to yield a close approximation of the finished plate’s contours, such that only minor additional carving is...