MSRaynsford

One of the early upgrades I found for the Ender 2 was this little tool tray that sits in a gap between the controller and the y axis. I downloaded it and plugged it into Cura and after slicing it told me it was going to take 8 hours to 3D print. As with most of these things I redrew it in 2D, lasercut the parts from sheet materials and assembled it. The whole thing took 30 mins from start to finish, the laser cutting part was less than 1 minute. 8 hours vs 1 minute is a massive difference. ( svg here ) 

A bit of a sad one for these scales. They were for a cosplay costume based on Avengers Endgame. It turns out that 2mm foam was too thick for the scales and the 1mm foam didn't arrive in time for the convention. These scales were cut on my newer laser though and the RF tube seems to have made a lot of difference to the vertical cuts. The 100W glass tube blasts away a big 'V' shape in the foam where as the 30W seems to have cut away just enough with minimal reflections. I shall cut more foam on the faster machine in the future.

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.

Sometimes I find it hard giving all the widgets and doohickeys meaningful names. I like Christmas foil decorations but this year I've been struggling to keep them hanging from the ceiling, they just keep pulling through the blu tack. Most things can be fixed with a laser cutter though, literally 90 seconds of drawing and cutting and I now have a handful of gadgets cut from 2mm perspex scrap. The string from the foil wraps through the gaps in the disk and the whole disk presses into the blu tack. In theory this should spread the weight load and stop them falling off the ceiling. It's working so far.

Bit of a semi complete project this one but it was something quick I did this morning. A friend wanted a score card flip board, 5 rounds, scores 1-10. I knocked this set together and looped in some number cards quickly to show it functioning. The cards will ultimately be laminated and I don't have a laminator so it's been sent out with printed number sheets to be cut and laminated at the other end. Hopefully they'll do a better job with the hole punch than I have done here.

My friend Ed was making these pancake pawns on his 3D printer for sale on Etsy  (not available currently). They're cute and he's got a wide range of them now so I wondered if I couldn't make something similar on the laser cutter which would be faster to produce. The laser cut version were definitely faster and had the option of adding colour but they're a little bit large and I never got round to shrinking them down to see how small they could go (The new laser would probably excel at the details though). It's another one of those projects that would go a lot further if I was actually interested in D&D myself :)

In one aspect of Vale I'm making tech to keep the node system functional, from the player side of things I'm trying to find ways to hit as many nodes as possible and collect all the stuff. While you're waiting at a node it would be really useful to know how long it had been since the node last spawned. There is a 6 hour window for 3 spawns so it's going to be roughly every 2 hours. I thought it would be handy to drop these counters near the node so anyone can update the time then, if you arrive 10 minutes after the previous drop it's worth going on to the next node. They're based on this wound counter design but two concentric rings allows me to set the hour and the minutes separately.

I made this simple, magnet free version of a score tracker for Blood and Oil . I used 0.8mm birch  for the front and back panels and 3mm poplar for the middle layer. The lettering was done with Hershey text to make it as fast as possible and the emblem is a combination of engraving and outlining. The idea was to make these as quick as possible for a batch order but I also liked the super skinny style. 

I was inspired by the Colibri Hummingbird Automata  to make this flapping wing version of my own automata. The flap isn't quite so good but the mechanism is a little simpler and it will suffice as a prototype for now.

From my little bits of wargaming experience it appears that each of the models sits on a small base which needs decorating which can be done with little disks and there are trays to move whole units of models around at once (even if just for display). My idea was to combine those two things together and make bases and trays where the pattern continues, as though the whole unit were on a marbled floor. Not sure if this is a desirable thing, let me know.

Eli wanted to dress as the Grashopper from James and the Giant Peach  to celebrate Roald Dahl day at school this year. We put together a paper mache mask based on a balloon and cut about to achieve the desired shape. He's very slowly writing an instructable about the process but I thought I'd include it her for the meantime. We did laser cut a monocle for it, which either counts as overkill or finishing touches. He was very happy with the finished result and I got to play with my new airbrush for various paint effects.