MSRaynsford

Cartoon animals and space themed mirrors, the kids love them.

Another useful tool for the tool box, radius guides. You can press these up against any given curve to measure what the actual radius of the curve is. It's not something you need very often so being able to create a set cheaply like this is rather handy.

I laser cut some vernier calipers from 3 layers of 1.5mm birch ply, it's fully functional and nearly as accurate as my actual calipers. ( svg here )

Hazels nursery had some very funky mirror tiles on, it inspired me to make some of my own, just simple illustrations but they came out pretty good. It's just 3mm mirror acrylic, they'll be an artwork bundle at the end of the series. 

I had another shot at the Market Tray last night and I'm much happier with the result. The original  test tray  used 4 layers stuck together but it's hard to make sure they're all aligned and misalignment can snag cards when they're tilted. The last market tray  avoids this by having the dividers vertically and keyed into the base but it's a bit slow to assemble. I compromised, this tray has a 3mm base and a 9mm top layer, by making the top in a single cut there is no snagging issue and I only have to align 2 layers together. All the names cut from 3mm and were glued onto the base afterwards to provide tipping points. These will go up in the shop in a few days time.

The market system in the game Puerto Rico takes a long time to set up, so what it really needed was a try to hold all the buildings in place that can be easily taken in and out of the box so I made one. Each space is capable of holding up to 4 buildings and has a wedge underneath each tile so that you can press down on one side and easily remove them. The remaining gap was dedicated to the bank as per the original tile board. It's all made from 3mm poplar and takes a bit of time to assemble so I think I'll be tweaking it again tonight but not bad for a first effort.

Bonus points for guessing my next board game trays.

Twice recently I have forgotten to turn on the air pump for my laser, the result was acrylic gunk all over the nozzle and I narrowly avoided cracking a lens. The Leetro controller has the capability to turn the pumps on automatically with the appropriate hardware. I connected up a Solid State Relay to the Y1 output on the controller, this SSR will switch 240V @ 25DA so is more than capable of turning the extractor fan and air pump on/off. I made up a little switch box to give me somewhere to easily plug things in without modifying their leads.  It's a simple arrangement and functioned as intended, the problem lies with the leetro controller. It turns the air off between layers and immediately after cutting. Ideally I need some smoothing and maybe a 60 second delay between the output turning off and the air turning off. Something to work on in the future I guess.