MSRaynsford

The newest cake project  is Aladdins Magic Carpet. Aladdin will be made of cake and we wanted him to be sat on a flying carpet. The prospect of making 10Kg of cake wobble around was a bit too much for me so I came up with this contraption instead. The whole device is based upon a Gimbal . The inner ring is fixed to some cake frame pillars  which will make it easy for Dawn to attach her cake Aladdin onto. The outer ring of the gimbal is driven by 2 servo motors to get movement in X and Y axis. The 'carpet' itself is made from some vacuum forming plastic, it will eventually be covered in icing. Because this plastic can be easily heat formed I took a hot air gun to it to give it some shape but also strategic bends on the corners also give it a lot of strength (you can see how much it was drooping in the video)

A new project that I'm working on requires a two axis gimbal  that holds the item in the stationary while the rings around it move. It's made from 3 layers of Birch ply with the middle layer placed at right angles to the outer layer to keep as much strength in it as possible. The whole thing can only be 9mm thick when flat so I had to embed the bolts into the middle of the wood (bit hard to see now) and the rotating side of the gimbal uses an acrylic insert to minimise the friction while rotating. It's definitely functional but needed a few more tweaks for my intended purpose.

In a further development from the Agricola bins I did a quick test piece to see if I could make a lid for each bin. Games don't always stay the right way up and tokens can be flipped out of the bins, The lid sits in grooves that have been engraved into the sides. I was worried about weakening the sheet but it seems fine. Now I'm just wondering if it's worth doing for the whole box. ( svg here )