MSRaynsford

A brief peek at one of the components for Project #52. This is a glueless chain drive, made up like a bicycle chain, the links have slots and tabs that hold together when the chain is pulled tight. I had to angle the teeth on the gears to make them rotate easily. ( Glueless chain drive files )

Thought I'd post these up while I'm still trying to fix my machine. In games like Puerto Rico, you need a specific number of tokens that varies depending on the number of players. This means that you start the game by counting out 75 colonists and umpteen victory points which makes setup slow and boring. The solution is to keep a pool of tokens and have another way to record how many have been taken. Simply set these dials to the required amount, subtract the number of tokens taken each round and when they get to zero it's "game over man".

That could have been a lot worse, imagine if I had a failure last week. My laser is still cutting on the left hand side but not on the right hand side, the power tapers off as it goes from left to right. The lenses are clean so I think it's an alignment issue. The laser beam also appears to have been wandering off from vertical for a little while now so I think the two problems are related. It's a pain for my current orders and for item #52 but I'm hoping that if I pull it all apart and clean it up tomorrow night I'll be back up and running soon enough.

These tiles are now available through my etsy store  or you can download the files from thingiverse So I might have underestimated how much drawing I had left to do on this game and then it took 2 hours of etching and cutting. It's a complete set of tiles for the board game Carcassonne , 72 tiles each drawn slightly differently. The complex tiles took 2+ hours each to draw. In the end I duplicated most of the city tiles making changes to the backgrounds rather than the more complicated buildings. This project actually started before the Catan board  with 2 test tiles that encouraged me to finish the whole set. (file needs fixing) 51 Projects/ 52 Weeks I even took some work in progress shots because I was keen to take the game out of the laser cutter.

I've had the best part of a week to come to terms with this, because I realised the mistake I'd made at the start of the week. It's taken a week to write this post not helped by the massively increased workload I put on myself. I've known for a while that I was a long way behind . I've worked hard to catch up and as you can see I just posted Project #50  and by the end of the night the next project will also be ready. The trouble is I've messed up the timings for my project,  Project #1  was posted on the 13th of October, exactly a year ago today which puts the end of Project 52  today instead of next week. I've spent every spare moment this week playing catch up, I've managed to (nearly) make 4 projects this week all thanks to my understanding wife, but when I realised my mistake on Monday, I had 50+ hours of work to get all 52 projects complete and that just wasn't going to happen. Tonight's item is a pure (but intensive) drawing project so i...

I've been wanting to make another marble machine for some time now, I was inspired to make this one in the rush to the end of this project. A single ball bearing rolls around the ring and the ring tilts to keep the whole thing moving. It's a simple elegant mechanism that evolved from 3 or 4 prior attempts using cams and gears and all sorts of complications. In the end it's just a bent axle and some freely rotating joints. The underside needs to be stronger before it can be released into the wild but I'll come back to it shortly. (file needs fixing) 50 Projects/ 50 Weeks