MSRaynsford

It's a bit hard to get a sense of scale for this whole machine so I finally remembered to take my camera along and get some pictures of the whole thing set up in the hut. Over the years I've now replaced all of the original panels with new ones, it's quite cool to have this whole machine evolve over the years. It reminds me a bit like hex from the Diskworld books. There are some very minor adjustments left to make in the new year but for now it has gone away for the winter.

I made this 5 point Iris way back in 2015, it was entirely wooden and given that it has been stored in containers and moved in and out and around for each event I'm surprised how well the whole thing has held up. Now that it's time to revamp the machine I wanted to keep this piece and turn it into a much more central part. The Iris previously led to a hole in the wall which could be (but never was) used to put things in and out. It always had the feeling that you were staring into the heart of the machine when you opened it and looked through (mostly because you could see the backstage junk through it). With my recent work on Infinity cubes it was fairly obvious what needed to go back there. This leaves a minor problem though, any large box on the back of this panel is going to be quickly destroyed as it gets moved in/out of storage. The solution to this tricky problem was to build a cube that could unfold and lie completely flat. The final back panel of the cu...

For another machine panel I wanted a way of passing smaller ( smaller than person sized ) objects in and out of the machine. The idea was to have a few different sized drawers in the panel, so I cut a few random sized boxes and looked to install them. This was the point where I had a much better idea and had to scrap those boxes. I have a tonne of 39mm squares from my caverna storage trays , they've been accumulating in a box waiting for something to happen to them. I realised they would look great on this panel and then the drawers could be in unit sizes and they would hide amongst the squares. I set out to fill the board leaving gaps for where I wanted the drawers to be and I alternated the grain on the squares to make a very subtle checker board pattern. It was a pain sanding and shimming each drawer down to fit exactly in the gap as required but ultimately worth it because it's hard to see where the drawers actually are when they're closed.