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Showing posts from September 15, 2013

Project #42 Iron Man 3 Arc Reactor

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I have already taken one shot at the Iron Man 3 arc reactor, but that was back before the film was released and the only shot we had of the arc was through Tony Starks T-shirt. Since then Marvel has released some official merchandise and there is a short scene in the film where Tony walks around with a torn shirt with the arc out. Most of the arcs I've seen are just basic triangles but I wanted to include some of those line details on my new arc. I had to put 2 layers of details on the arc, the basic triangle is on silver engraving laminate, the second layer is clear acrylic and the line details really catch the light coming through from behind. The colour is the hardest part, the arc is cyan, but Cyan LED's appear green. To get round this problem I'm actually using RGB LED's and I turn on the blue and the green LED's at the same time. Because of this there are actually twice as many LED's in the arc and it shines uber bright. The batteries won't last...

Project #41 Double Useless Machine

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A natural extension of the useless machine , it's just a small logical step to put 2 arms inside the same box. There is a place between the two 'on' positions of a toggle switch where neither side is actually on. From this precarious position even a little bump can cause the switch to fall into one of the on positions, leaving the arms to battle it out forever. It's very similar in principle to the other machine, all simple electronics and wiring. The toggle switch crosses over the battery wires to change the direction of the motors. Each arm only moves forward when the opposite limit switch pushed. ( svg here ) These machines are available as kits through my shop 41 Projects / 47 Weeks

Project #40 Settlers of Catan

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This is the epic kind of project I imagine for next years 12 in 12 but for some reason I squeezed it into a weekly project, not ideal when I'm so far behind but sometimes these things just need to be done. It expands upon the resource holder I made last week. Using the same artwork as the icons on each of the tiles, I created ports and sea tiles in the same theme. All the tiles are made from laser ply, with veneer on top. The sea tiles are a nice blue stained veneer. Each tile has 12 magnets embedded into it, 2 for each side, arranged so they alternate between north and south, this allows the tiles to snap together at any angle and also allows the tiles to click into a stack. (see the video below). The complete set of tiles uses about 500 magnets. I'm seriously thinking about kickstarting this as a set for people to purchase, multiple preorders should help bring the price down to something reasonable. 40 Projects / 47 Weeks  

Chunky Lizards

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As a custom request I cut some A5 sized lizards from 6mm laser ply. The lizards are a redraw of Eschers design using a computer program to recreate the tessellations (Written by the customer). They worked first time without any tweaking, so I would say it was a good test result for his design.

Simple Brackets

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When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. I needed some T pieces to hold up scarecrows at the event just gone. I said I would make 6 stands so I needed 12 brackets (one on each side). It only briefly crossed my mind to make them by hand and I'm glad I didn't. I drew up the first set pretty quickly, and while I was assembling it I cut the other 5 sets. It's like having a second pair of hands, I couldn't assemble and cut at the same time so it was faster, easier and left me with a better bracket, a winner all round.