MSRaynsford

I needed a quick and dirty flux capacitor prop so I threw one together from laser cut parts. There are 4 LED's under each arm of the Y shape and they're connected to a Digispark  board to make them flash. The whole thing runs on battery power. If I had more time and inclination I'd weather the paint effects slightly, round some of the corners off on the wires and recut the top panel but for now I'm pleased with the effect. ( svg here )

After doing all those funny materials for the sample wall last week I guess my extractor fan must be clogged, smoke started creeping out the front of the machine and I realised how full the cutter was. I decided to plough on because I needed to get the jobs finished so I opened the lid, bypassed the switch and opened the garage door. This was the vast plume of smoke that came off one of my useless machine kits. So yeah, these things make a lot of smoke and some of it ultimately creeps out when you open the lid. More pics to follow when I get to the route of the problem.

Inspired by their foray into laser cutting Team Rembandts  came back later in the afternoon to get some more cutting done. This time they decided to cut their logo into the lid of the PC case and insert orange plastic into the gaps. The panel was made from ABS plastic and we only had one shot at it, I overcooked it slightly but the final panel still came out really well. This may also be the last shot of my wooden bowl as I forgot to collect it back from them at the end of the day, no big deal I'm sure it would have been firewood in a few months time.

The guys from Cooler Master UK were exhibiting at the Maker Faire, they were making some amazing case modifications and had cut one of these spars out completely by hand. When they realised we had a laser cutter they bought their files down to us and we cut the rest of the spars for them. There are 2 slightly different designs, I overpowered the cuts and the whole thing took about 20 minutes but it sure beats doing it all by hand.

There have been a lot of hexes produced over the last week and you're probably wondering where they are all going. We wanted to demonstrate all the materials that could be cut on a laser like the Vanilla box  so we gathered them all together and put them onto a sample wall. Each Hex tile is placed loosely into the framework and held in with a wide border. The bottom border section contains a label for the material and where applicable who sells the material. One final hex contains text describing what the wall is about what we're demonstrating on each tile. Gluing this all together took a whole day, last week was a long week and I haven't even mentioned the 'big' project yet :)

I did cut all 8 of the polypropylene colours available from Kitronik  but I was running up against the deadline and I glued some of them down before I took the photos. Polypropylene is a weird material, it is laser safe and it does cut but the edge is never very nice, it also doesn't really engrave and it tends to warp while cutting. It is a good material when you need something thin and flexible.

These samples were cut from coloured plastazote foam, Techsoft sells a multipack containing all eight different colours. I've cut a fair amount of this foam before with all the LRP weapons and it's my favourite foam material to laser. It actually feels like it cuts correctly rather than melting away from the beam.

I just got back from the UK maker faire, having a laser cutter on display means we can cut things for people while we're there. This morning Kitronik asked us to make an adapter for their micro:bit s. The Maker faire badges had holes for attachments already and this adapter allowed the micro:bit to be hung from the maker badge.