MSRaynsford

Kim found a rather fetching Game of Thrones image on tumblr somewhere and she suggested it would make a nice laser cut. Clearly listening to my wife is a good thing as this has turned out lovely. It's a colour wash on laser ply which gives this great effect of being coloured but still having the wood grain showing. I had to cut 2 halves to get the black and the white so I put the opposite sides together as well. ( svg here ) 12 Projects/ 22 Weeks

I'm not sure why I haven't made Iron man stands before. My Wife says she suggested it months back. It's a great place to keep your arc on display while you're not wearing it. Just working out the kinks, the kits and the costs but expect both the MkV and the Mk2 flavour stands to be appearing shortly.

We're decorating Eli's room with a robot theme, vinyl wall stickers and various other things. My wife asked if I could cut a robot back plate to go round the light switch. Job done :) ( svg here )

The real point of the marble machines  was to test lifting mechanisms for the revamp of donkey kong . Now that I've tucked some other projects out of the way I can start looking at this again. DK uses 20mm steel ball bearings so the lifting mechanism for that needs to be rather stronger than the small lifts. I like the Archimedes screw design because, with a few tweaks, it could be scaled up to something suitable. This sturdier screw was made using a much larger central shaft (6mm x 6mm square section). The steps of the spiral overlap each other providing more surfaces to glue for each step. The whole thing is designed to be operated at 45 degrees so that the weight of the ball is on the trough rather than the moving part. Perhaps the biggest change is the way spiral is supported. The larger ball allows me to skip a step in the spiral and I can add a bracket into the gap. This means I don't have to make a 450mm long unsupported spiral and worry about it flexing. The ball