MSRaynsford

I've posted a few parts recently with no real reason and no obvious indication of their use, other than part of the What If Machine. Hopefully when the parts are brought together in this photo you'll start to get an idea of what I'm building. 297/311

I made a small change to the girders , putting a step on each of the tabs stops this part from pushing through the top and bottom of the girder, the whole thing is a much nicer construction now. 296/310

Although it's on a super tiny scale I wanted these mini ladders to actually look like ladders so I extended the rungs tabs out past the slots in the verticals to give a little it a little bump. When laying flat they look a little bit like train tracks though (might do something with that at some point) 295/310

With a rough idea for my machine module in mind I constructed this frame to hold the parts of my machine. I figured it will be easier to have something solid to build upon. This will no doubt grow in width and depth but those parts may well be removable. 

Jason Dorie has created some pretty useful software for creating half tone images. This was called reactor and it creates a mixture of dots and swirls to create the right greyscale.   294/308

Clearly the trick to greyscale images is to go a little bit larger. This is A5 and it works quite well. the underlying grain is still picked up quite a lot though so there is still room for improvement. 293/308

Not actually Hack Manchester but another custom arc. I've made one like this before except it wasn't laser cut so pleased to be able to do that now. I've made this to take along to EMF camp at the start of September. 292/307

I had a request from a customer for an arc with this pattern on it. I duly went to the laser cutter and cut one out. 291/307

Everyday you learn something new and I picked this up from the hackspace this evening. I'd completely overlooked the greyscale settings on the laser control package. This is a quick and not great example while I try to figure out how it works but there is lots of potential here. 290/306

When the first mechanism didn't work a rethink was needed. This mechanism sit's completely under the hopper reducing the footprint size and replaces the existing base plate. It doesn't work either :) 289/306 

The boxes within the hopper need to be pushed out from the bottom of the stack so this first attempt was prototyped in lego (video below, album here ). Turns out the conversion to wood was not straight forward, the boxes are a slightly different shape so were getting stuck in the hopper and the arm didn't push them far enough out. It took a few nights to draw though so I'm posting this (and the others anyway) 288/306

The question arose today, 'Is it possible to laser etch Lego?'. So I grabbed some Lego and headed to the laser and yep, you can. The internet boffins at the hackspace said it was ABS plastic so success was pretty much guaranteed.  287/306