MSRaynsford

I took some time out from my day to day to actually paint one of the 3D models I printed . I wanted this Iron Man to be super smooth so I sanded it and filled it and sanded it again. It's genuinely quite a lot of work to make it perfectly smooth. I didn't use an air brush so there were 3-4 layers on the gold parts and 2-3 on the red ones, the whole thing was finished in spray laquer to make it shiny. You can still see some of the print lines through the paint job so I think I'd end up using more filler and even more sanding for a serious job but this came out pretty well. The eyes were filled with a metallic blue, in case you're wondering.

With my new vacuum former gap  I decided it was a good time to shuffle things around in the garage. My main laser cutter has occupied a space right in the middle of my garage for years now, my second laser cutter  got put in the doorway with all the best intentions. The trouble is that the main machine has kind of blocked access to it meaning I rarely squeeze past it to use the small machine. This shuffle simply switched them over but already it feels like there is more space to work in and hopefully I'll start to work on some of the projects I intended to build on with this smaller laser. 

The G Weike machines we imported from China were always quite big, they didn't split in the middle and they wouldn't fit through a single doorway, this was because the Z axis drops all the way down to the floor allowing you to engrave the surface of deep boxes. In reality this is something nobody ever does and fitting machines through doorways is far more common but just this once I actually used the maximum capacity of the machine. With the Z axis all the way down to the floor and the nozzle extension tube shortened I was just about able to fit this travellers chest into my machine. I had to pad the bottom side of the chest to keep it flat and level. If you're interested in discovering more about this box and the contents then you can check it out at One Way Out Escape Rooms , it's central to their new game 'Robots Return' . They're cautiously opening again on the 4th of July to single households and I can vouch that their games are great to play, I'm o...

I made sheetfuls of ear savers for Leicester hospitals as part of a larger project, 2000 were made in total. My wife has been working in Kettering hospital and she saw this trayful over their this evening. It's nice to know that they're circulating around and still being useful.