MSRaynsford

The 1000th project for this blog very much took on a life of its own. I knew I wanted to make something big and impressive so the idea of making 1000 of something had a lot of appeal. The laser makes it very easy to churn out 1000 identical items so I also wanted to make something that needed assembly, something where I had specifically touched all 1000 things. So I built this little shark model , it had a few iterations and eventually ended up with five ribs and a flexible tail. I managed to tessellate 60 onto a  sheet of poplar ply  and I set the machine to cutting out 18 sheets, each sheet taking just over an hour to complete. In between sheets I would pull the parts out of the laser and scoop them into boxes for later assembly. I spent many nights sat in front of the TV assembling parts and in full flow I was assembly one every 45 seconds, so it was roughly another 18 hours for shark assembly. This left me with two,80L crates full of sharks and lots of time to figure o...

This is my 1000th laser cut item. It's nearly my fifth blog anniversary and I wanted to make something epic so I built this shark tank and housed 2 large sharks inside it. Each shark is made from 500 smaller sharks so over the last few weeks I have cut and assembled 1000 of the smaller laser sharks , 1000 things for my 1000th item. Portholes  into the tank allow you to see the sharks from all different angles.

I'll be attending the New York Maker Faire  this weekend coming. I'm taking as many items and kits as I can possibly manage but I also wanted something smaller that I could gift or sell as appropriate. I ended up cutting 200 of the mini shark kits, if you would like one simply come and find me at the maker faire and tell me you read my blog. I actually cut a whole lot more sharks last month but that's a project due to be completed in the next few days so keep an eye out for that.

I have combined all my tips and tricks for making a good kit into this one new design now available for sale in my store . You've seen this shark pop up a few times recently but I've now turned it into kit form. It varies from the original shark after Sam from Shiny Shiny  wisely suggested that I put a flex section in the tail. The kit itself numbers each part on both sides of the slots so part 1 fits into slot 1 etc, but when they are slotted together both numbers are hidden from view. Each part is held into the framework by very small 0.8mm wide tab which can be easily broken (so no need for a knife) and each tab is pointed at by an arrow so you know where to snap. I have redrawn the Just Add Sharks logo to be a Hershey text font which makes it much faster to cut and I have also included a little illustration of an assembled shark which will also aid building. Buy one from the store or cut one for yourself. ( svg here )

At first glance this might look like a turkey temperature gauge and you'd be forgiven for thinking that because that's basically what it is. It's actually a laser power meter which is essentially a thermometer for laser beams. The large black block on the end of the thermometer is a thermal mass to hold the heat and it is placed in the path of the laser beam (usually before mirror 1). The beam is fired for a specific length of time and the laser heats the metal. The temperature change of the metal block is directly proportional to the amount of power being output by the laser. The whole gauge is calibrated to the dial by the length of time to fire the beam, in our case 15.3 seconds. You have to let the gauge cool down between measurements, although you can hurry that along by dunking it in cold water. There is also an adjustment knob on the back which allows you rotate the scale so that zero lines up with the needles current position. This also qualifie...

Another A2 sized stencil cut from Mylar material. You'll be seeing where this one actually gets used in the near future but for now it'll allow us to mark up some of the things around the unit.

I simply can't understand how you can buy a laser pointer and have it delivered to your house for less than £1 but I'm not going to complain about it. Instead I'm just going to strap one to my little shark model and use it to bug the cat (and children), yay lasers!

I've been through some iterations on a little shark model recently. Figured it would be nice to have a little giveaway at some point. This one is almost ready but I did a bit of playing with scale. The largest here is 150mm long and is the 'right' size, the teeny one is made from 0.8mm ply and is just 44mm from nose to tail, a bit too small really but still cute.

Over at Just Add Sharks we're building our own laser cutter and that means design revisions and multiple prototypes. I'm sure you all saw our previous version  built over the course of a weekend and intended to test several design choices, such as the gantry mounted tube and the grbl / visicut software combination. We threw together an acrylic box full of interesting curves and features but when I got it home it felt very impractical. The curve on the lid was pretty wonky and I felt we needed to go back to the drawing board to design something we could actually build in quantity. With two weeks to go till the maker faire and a broken laser  it was a pretty big task, but I'm very happy with this new revision. The first significant change was to rebuild the gantry, the previous build used a large box section but that was replaced with a single sheet, the rail gives it strength and the stepper and drive belt can be fixed to it with minimal change. The laser tube moun...

With my Whitetooth currently down , it's a good time to fetch out some projects I've not written up and what better place to start. I would like to introduce you to the Vanilla Box laser cutter , it's a pretty big project I've been working on and it has been eluded to several times on this blog with new tube mounts and box designs . A whole team of people came together over Easter weekend to build the first working concept of a new laser cutter that Just Add Sharks would like to manufacture. The intention is to build a no compromise laser cutter with all the essential parts but none of the costly frills and we would love to hit the £1000 sweet spot. So if this is something that would interest you, why not sign up to our low volume mailing list to be kept ahead of the developments, or come and see it in person at the.  Maker Faire UK on the 23rd & 24th April at the Centre for Life in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne . This case is obviously laser cut from 3mm acry...

Merry Christmas from me and Just Add Sharks . It's been a busy year and I'm well behind on Project 12 but maybe I'll be able to squeeze a 10th project out before the year end.

This is a post about nothing. I meant to write it a while ago but I got distracted making lots of awesome things and posting about those. I used to write about my laser cutter all the time because there was always some way in which it was failing or needing improvement and I don't do that any more. The simple fact is that I don't have anything to write about. I've had my Whitetooth laser cutter for about 18 months now . We started our own laser cutter company, so using our own machines day in day out and posting all the awesome things seems like a no brainer. In those 18 months I haven't had a single problem with my machine,  The extractor fan draws all the dust and particles out of the laser so the machine stays pretty clean, the smoke actually goes out the back which was a shock having seen other lasers.  The fine pitched mirror screws and locking nuts make alignment very simple (no more allen keys for adjustments) and the machine actually stays align...

We were inspired by the Glowforge laser cutters ability to continuously autofocus it's z axis. A camera mounted in the head of the laser detects a laser dot being shone onto the surface of the material and from there it can determine how far the lens needs to be adjusted to set the focal height for the correct cutting distance. The Nintendo Wii Remote has an optical camera in it that is used to detect up to four points of infrared light. The hardware automatically identifies these points and feeds back XY positions through a bluetooth connection. The cutting laser on a laser cutter is an infrared beam, as it cuts through the surface of the material there is a moment where it is reflected off the material and the Wiimote is able to detect the location of the cut. The location data is fed back to a laptop and by comparing this point against the initial 'in focus' point we're able to detect if the Z axis needs to move up or down and by how much. The laptop sends dat...