MSRaynsford

New laser bench with sheets stored underneath it I've had my new laser cutter resting on it's packing create for several months, I recently ordered 100 sheets of Birch plywood, 800x600mm and I still had about 50 sheets of poplar left from the last order so all of that needed a new home inside the garage (rather than the utility room). I rummaged through the scraps and planks in the shed and I already had enough parts to make a new small bench so I took my trusty little helper and we made a bench one day (you can tell the girls were out because we made it in the kitchen to avoid the rain). The bench works well, it's a little bit wobbly but it does bring the laser up to a nicer height for working at. As you can see I still have to plumb the extraction in to the existing outlet rather than opening the garage, especially in the cold weather, everything takes time. My helper for the day Child shown for scale Laser in place on new bench

Door strip between the raised wooden floor and the kitchen tiles. I made this door strip  18 months ago very much as a test piece. Even then it was showing signs of wear so the fact it lasted all this time was great. The wood had warped a little and it had lifted on one side. The front edge was a little cracked from being stood on (it was too long) and the whole thing was pretty grubby from general use. I reinforced the underside of the strips with some 1.5mm birch (it was only made from 0.8mm originally), I also reinforced the stack of pieces too. The whole thing was sanded, reglued and varnished and it's like new again but this time done as a proper job. Lets see how long it lasts this time around. Grubby door strip, halfway through sanding It's so long clamping it flat to the dining room table was the best option.

Here is a picture of the cake toppers actually in the cake too. It's another cake made by Dinkydoodle designs  and the toppers are cut from 3mm mirrored acrylic.

I was asked to put together a handful of simple box shapes which are going to be decorated and turned into war gaming terrain. I worked from a simple diagram and made as many boxes as possible from 4 sheets of 2mm mdf (600x900). The trick is making the finger joints mesh together to cut as efficiently as possible.

So far in this series of blog posts I've talked about setting up the ruida controller and wiring it into the laser cutter , now is the point where it needs to be tested to ensure that it actually works as intended. In the previous post I failed to mention that the power connector needs to be rewired but it's a straight forward swap of GND and +24V. Once the controller can actually be turned on we're ready to start testing. Testing Automatic Features Safety is all important while testing the machine, there are moving parts and laser beams during this whole process so care should be taken. The big red emergency stop on the machine is always close to hand, the key switch similar. The safety interlock lid switch for the laser is still wired directly to the high voltage power supply so the laser will not fire with the lid open or the water pump off. The first test is to ensure that both axis move in the correct direction. The controller was set up to initia...