MSRaynsford

I saw a discussion about how to make these kind of tree cutouts with multiple leaves, it inspired me to give it a try. I've included the process in photos below. People seem to use this style for wedding gifts and family trees. I tried to add some graded paint effects, I think I used a bit too much paint to start with before I started watering it down and spreading it to the edges. The next one will be better. Start by cutting out the blanks for painting, I also cut out the tree trunk because it's going to be a different colour. Paint the blank and the tree trunk, I tried for a colour wash effect so that there is some colour gradient across the piece. Put the painted blank back into the laser cutter and cut the shapes from it, you can see I have already switch the red tree trunk for the brown painted one. Tape the cut shapes back into the board so that they can all be lifted out of the laser as a single piece. Glue the back of the cut ...

I've been wanting to make an interesting clock variant for some time now and I thought it would be cool to have each digit represented by an analogue gauge, so here is my design for an alternate clock. The top two dials represent the hour (in a 24 hour format) and the bottom 2 dials represent the minutes. The whole system is run by an Arduino connected to an  I2C Real Time Clock module  and an I2C PWM Servo Driver . Having both the RTC and the Servo Driver on I2C , is definitely a bit of overkill for this simple project but it does leave a lot of IO free for future expansion and the servo control is exceptionally steady (no jitter) The dials are made from a combination of laser cut wood (stained dark) and perspex. Each dial has a white perspex backing which has been engraved and infilled with acrylic paint to achieve a high contrast on the numbers. There is a second piece of clear perspex over the front of each dial to enclose the pointer and stop small fingers f...

I made a prototype dial for another project and it all came together well. It's mostly Birch ply, stained dark brown. The pointer is 1.5mm ply painted black and attached to a cut down servo arm. The backing is 3mm white acrylic, infill painted with black acrylic paint. The whole thing has another layer of 3mm clear acrylic over the front to act as a protective layer. It's a standard 9g servo behind it and connected to an arduino to make it easy to drive.

I made this gauge with white acrylic and a black paint infill to bring out the numbers, although I engraved through the protective layer and used it as a mask I think it's probably easier to just engrave the material without the mask because the paint wipes off the plastic pretty easily, now that I'm using airbrush paints.