Model Engineers Exhibition

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This weekend just gone I was exhibiting at the Model Engineers Exhibition, at Sandown Race Course. A whole bunch of makers were invited to the show to exhibit our crazy new fangled tools and projects. It was a pretty good exercise in bridging the divide between makers and model engineers. We're both the same anyway just working on different things. I genuinely had a great time, the whole thing had a feel of a maker faire but with far less children and many more of the adults already knew the technology existed.

I went down on Friday with a stall full of laser cut items and a few kits for sale. I pretty much sold everything I'd taken on the first day(yay for covering my hotel expenses etc). On Saturday Dominic brought our new laser cutter down and we were able to demonstrate the machine in action. We just ran Christmas cards all day because cardboard doesn't produce a lot of fumes and they're pretty cheap to give away.

For the first time ever I had nice things to say about 3D printing, Justin from Active 3D, designed and printed us a fancy knob to replace our slightly naff Z axis handle. The whole thing was about 2 hours from request to arrival and is truly what 3D printing is about, Rapid Prototyping. The finished item is extremely functional, nicely shaped and if we wanted to take that for professional manufacture we know that the item works. We in turn paid it forwards by laser cutting some parts for Michael.

Quite a few people took my business card to find out more information about the lasers we have for sale. That information can be found over on our other website http://www.justaddsharks.co.uk/.
It's not quite the introduction I wanted to give for our new lasers but I have time to work on that over Christmas



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