MSRaynsford

I took a second shot at Settlers of Catan. For my first attempt I made myself an awesome set of wooden veneers and magnetic tiles , lots of people wanted it but nobody wanted to pay the £150 it would cost to produce sets like that. I've gone back to basics and modified the original tiles. They now have mdf backing for strength and only 6 magnets per tiles (which is still £10 worth of magnets). Because of the reduced number of magnets the tiles only work in half the orientations. This is no big deal because the actual orientation doesn't matter. Each tile is marked with + or - signs to denote which way round the magnet should go. The tiles still have more than enough strength to hold and lock together. ( svg here ) If you don't have a laser cutter or you just can't be bothered to find your own magnets I'm making the tiles available in two sets, the standard set contains 6 edge pieces and 19 hex tiles and all the magnets to fill the gaps. This is eno...

Newcastle Maker Faire 2014, was my first maker faire of the year. Being the UK Maker Faire it always has a pretty good turnout and this is my fourth year in attendance. This year I went under the guise of Just Add Sharks , our company that sells laser cutters. We took along a Blacknose laser cutter set up to run the Etch a Sketch laser cutter so that people could see it for real and have a play with it. We were incredibly well received by the community. A number of other makers loved being able to see the machine in person and we definitely picked up a few sales from the weekend. We even got a favourable mention on the Make blog , (although I always feel like I jumble my words when presented with any form of recording device). More importantly than that we got to meet a whole bunch of regular friends and make some new ones. Newcastle locals were surprised to hear how far we had come since last year. Guys like Alan Mahon made the trip all the way from Ireland again just to be a...