MSRaynsford

One of the cool things about the recent discovery of an aperiodic monotile, is that it's not just one tile. In fact it's a whole range of tiles, subtly different to each other. The two main shapes that have been taken from this are the 'Hat' as cut yesterday and the 'Turtle which I've cut today. I guess these two shapes have been adopted because they're easily made up from standard kites. Again I cut these in sheets with the grain in the same direction and used the gaps between the shapes to make kites ( svg here )  

The discovery of a solution to the Einstein Problem  has caused a bit of a stir in the mathematical world this week. It's a shape that tiles the plane, but never repeats and while I don't entirely understand the implications or the mathematical proof of such a thing, I know a good looking tessellation when I see one so I set about making up a few. The first tile is known as the 'Hat' (although I think it looks much more like a T-shirt). The tile is made up from a number of different kite shapes so I also cut a few of those out as well. The full shapes are roughly 80mm across and 60mm wide and I cut them in three different flavours of wood veneered MDF, pine, beech and cherry (left overs from the Loki box ) I redrew my own sheet for cutting to ensure that all of the wood grains on all of the pieces align in the same direction and this is what gave me kites to fill in the gaps ( svg here )

The 'From Shadows' event was held at the Gaol in Oakham and as you would expect from an urban air soft site held in an old prison there are still actual cells available for playing in. Looking for a futuristic way to indicate if a cell is open/closed and being unable to actually lock people in cells I was asked to make these 'door locks' for the event. Each door lock is a simple arrangement of batteries and LED's, keeping them cheap allowed me to make ten locks within the budget. The state change from locked to unlocked is done with a micro switch that becomes activated once a key card is inserted into the slot at the top of the unit. Once I started pushing cards into the slot though I realised I would be able to do something much more clever for minimal effort. By taking a number of notches out of the bottom of the card and having a similar notch arrangement inside the slot I could set it up so that each card would only open the appropriate door lock....

This much larger dodge viper logo was painted metallic and the letters picked out in black to stand out. This one was mounted directly to the wall as a piece of art.