MSRaynsford

Ye olde tablet weaving is a way of making decorative bands that have a million uses. Like many old crafts it uses simple tools which can be easily recreated with modern means. The basic weaving set requires 8 tablets with holes in the corners and 1 or 2 shuttles to wind thread onto. Plain tablets are a little bit dull so we added these celtic ravens as decoration. I chose to do them as line art instead of engraving to make them really stand out. ( svg here )

These large stencils are cut from 350 micron mylar. A friend asked if I could cut some stencils and I just happened to be visiting Bee Crafty  on Monday who gave me some really useful advice about what I needed and how fast to cut it. The mylar cuts really well and if you keep the power sufficiently low you can avoid the burn reflections on the reverse.

I've been through some iterations on a little shark model recently. Figured it would be nice to have a little giveaway at some point. This one is almost ready but I did a bit of playing with scale. The largest here is 150mm long and is the 'right' size, the teeny one is made from 0.8mm ply and is just 44mm from nose to tail, a bit too small really but still cute.

I made some of these way back in the day, I noted they had issues then and I didn't post the files. I actually corrected them about 6 months later but don't appear to have blogged that at all. I do keep getting asked about them though so I thought I'd post up the files. This time round as I was looking at them, the lengths and curves all seemed wrong so this is basically a redraw of the whole damn thing just so I can share the files. ( svg here )

These little gaming counters are very useful if you need to track something like hit points or scores for a whole wide range of games. The clever thing here is the use of the magnets in the middle which allow the wheels to hold together and rotate but doesn't add any thickness to the counter. ( Gaming Counter Files Here )

I make a lot of things and from time to time I need to clear some space so I've put my arcade cabinet up on ebay. You can see the original info about the build here  and if you feel like you would like to own it for yourself you can bid on it here .  

Continuing my quest for noise makers I made one of these air horns . A membrane is stretched over the back of the horn, air goes in through the mouthpiece and escapes from the outer ring to the inner hole, as it does so it vibrates the membrane which produces a loud sound. The benefit of this design is that you can add a cone to amplify the sound coming out. I was a little disappointed by the volume when I made this before EMF camp, but at EMF camp I discovered that if I stretch the membrane tighter (with my thumbs in the hole) the noise became rather deafening. It certainly made people jump in our tent and was probably heard halfway across the field. I definitely need to remake one of these with a tighter membrane.

I also cut some rings for Sam at the same time as the perspex. These were cut from oak veneered mdf , like all mdf it creates a lot of smoke when it cuts and that can stain the surface. Masking it is still one possible solution but at least with veneers you can sand them smooth and clean again. Sam also needed some claps for necklaces so we squeezed those into the material too, it's a very clever laser cut solution and we all know everything should be lasered if at all possible.