MSRaynsford

Last night at Chaosdorf we cut a few little samples to see what would work on the laser cutter. This bottle top was a fantastic success. I'm expecting some awesome things when they start engraving their own logos on to the bottle tops for their home brew (and now I'm home again I'm relaxing and thoroughly enjoying one of the bottles we bought home with us)

Tonight I'm in Germany and more specifically Düsseldorf where we're visiting the Chaosdorf Hackspace . We have just installed a Greyfin laser cutter  and they decided to engrave the hackspace logo onto the top of an old IBM thinkpad. They've picked up the software pretty quickly, imported their design and with a few gentle nudges have etched this logo onto the lid of the laptop. After a bit of a cleaning scrub it came out really nicely.  It'll be a fun night here at their social evening and then back to the UK for Dominic and I tomorrow.

My black on white, laser engraving laminate finally arrived so I could sit down and do some more of the White Knight Designs . As a game of thrones fan these two really caught my eye and it was good fun putting them through the laser cutter last night. Jordan  has been great about sending me higher resolution artwork than I can steal from Facebook so I cut them in duplicate and will be sending the second set in his direction. In the meantime don't forget about my attempt to jump start my Carcassonne set file release .

Nearly a year ago I completed my Laser cut set of Carcasonne , it's been up for sale in my webstore  but I am continually asked to release the svg file so people can cut there own. I normally share all my files but I have a few problems with this one, it took 160 hours to draw the base tile set and a further 24 hours to draw the river . I haven't been able to justify giving the file away but with the world being the way it is I can't sell it as a file to individuals because it only takes one person to share the file elsewhere and I've lost all control over it. So I've come up with this 'Jumpstart me' idea. I'm asking for just £500 (not a lot of 200 hours of work) and when I reach that amount I will release the files to the general public. In the meantime you can purchase the files for just £10 and you get help us get towards the amount needed for general release. Purchase the Carcassonne Files here Current total £350 / £500 (Updated Dec 201

This is not the project it should have been. I was supposed to be engraving this design onto the side of a blank sword (A 3 layer foam sandwich with a carbon fibre rod in the middle). I was supposed to mark the outline ready for cutting. The problem is that with the rod sticking out the end of the foam there was just no way to make the sword fit inside the 1200mm wide hole to get it under the laser head. It was really the wrong combination of thickness and size. Plan B, I cut and engrave the swords as 3 separate panels and they get turned back into a sword when they are returned back to Eldritch. This was an option, right up until the moment I left Nottingham because even just foam blanks were 1100mm long. Plan C, I cut the each layer in 2 parts, small enough so they fit inside my laser.  As you can see, not everything works out as planned, This has left us with an interesting sandwich arrangement but I'm sure Simon will be able to work his magic in it. I shall po

I hadn't really thought about to before but when you're making a dozen similar LRP weapons at once it pays to have a template to trace around. Simon asked me to upgrade his lino templates to perspex ones which. There are 4 sizes, the longest being 1.1m long so I took a trip up to Nottingham hackspace to use their larger laser cutter . These were cut from 6mm perpsex and came out rather sturdy