MSRaynsford

It's nearly Halloween and I had an afternoon of building fun with the kids trying to make a new decoration. This scary clown will be mounted over our doorway on Monday night ready to greet the trick or treaters. It took about 2 hours all done, 45 minutes drawing, 15 mins cutting and an hour painting and assembly. The face was drawn and split into several different layers which made it easy to give the kids one part and one colour of paint plus adds to the 3D effect. It's just corrugated card and poster paint which makes it cheap and we'll hope for a dry night. ( svg here )

This is my laser cut cryptex. It features 28 different characters and 9 rings, giving a total possible 10.5 Trillion different combinations. I took a bit of time developing the design so that I could add some nice features. This cryptex file is laid out so that you can have any number of rings in your own design. The best feature is that the codeword is changeable, each locking ring has an outer letter ring that can be placed in any one of the 28 different positions. Once the rings are back in place the ring locking bars can added and they prevent the rings from being modified until the box is open again. It's a bit hard to explain so I made a video showing how it all work ( svg here ) It took a long time to assemble this so I lived with my initial design choices but if I were to remake it I would adjust the file to make the ring locking bars out of 6mm ply and maybe put some blind holes onto the code rings to prevent the code being brute forced.