MSRaynsford

Steph is still drawing up some amazing artwork that inspires me to make pretty lasery things. She now has a Patreon account  where you can support her artistic efforts. While I was looking over there I noticed this amazing kitty picture which was just crying out to be converted to wood veneers. He is called Bobby and he's a bit of a mascot (you'll notice him illustrating the $30 reward). I wanted to do it justice so I filled all the gaps and sanded/varnished it properly. It still needs a lot more elbow grease but it's looking lovely already.

Eldritch thought the pattern from my box lid would go rather well as a shield embellishment. I had to modify it slightly engraving away some of the inner patches and drawing the rest as line art but I think they're going to come out really nice when painted and latexed.

The postman arrived this morning with a long slim parcel, I didn't remember ordering anything of that shape and there was no indication of sender on the outside. The parcel turned out to be a LARP safe oar, all ready for painting and latexing. Just a typical day really when objects like these turn up with no prior warning, next step is to email Eldritch and ask if it came from them. Yep, it needs to say "That's a paddlin'!" on the side in a hand carved font. 20 minutes later it's ready to be sent back again, maybe I'll ask the postman to hang around next time.

I completely redid the cupboard door for Eldritch , I've been building up with various testing recently  and it culminated in this simple design. Doing these simple outlines as a normal engrave would take 2 hours, doing this engraving as a series of lines took 20 minutes as a 'faux' engrave, unfocusing the laser to get a nice wide beam reduced the time to just 5 minutes. A fairly significant improvement. It has limited uses but it's nice to experiment and know exactly what is possible, you'll never know when you need it.

This siren whistle from instructables has a lot of irritating sound for its size. There were scaling issues with the files I imported so I ended up cutting them in 2 different sizes, both are quite load but need a lot of puff and occasionally the spinning disk in the middle appears to jam. Time to start looking at air horns and vuvuzelas.

I want to make some noise makers and there are a few designs online but it's really hard to decide how loud they are actually going to be. Have laser, will cut, so I made up a few for testing. The first one is this train whistle , modified to actually be glued together, it's a good sturdy whistle as you would expect but not quite loud enough for me.