MSRaynsford

It came to my attention that I sell the Escher Lizards on Etsy as packs of 20 but I don't sell them on my blog. These charming lizards can be tessellated in all sorts of patterns and styles as demonstrated elsewhere on the blog .

There appears to be a bit of a dead spot for smoke extraction on the entire left hand side of my unit. Smoke tends to linger in the air and it's really noticeable in terms of laser power drop off and smoke staining on the work piece. As I was buying some parts from Proto-Pic anyway I happened to notice they had a squirrel cage blower , at the low price of £3.30 it was worth getting one to try. It's a great, tiny unit, that moves a lot of air around.  I placed it loosely in the corner of my machine and bodged a power supply into it and you can see the improvement for yourself. The left hand wheel was cut before the blower, the right hand afterwards. Yes it's another moving part but it's significantly quieter than the other fans and pumps so you barely notice it running. I'm now acquiring another one for the other corner of the laser to blow across the whole work piece and then I'll get them both wired in and turning on/off with the main extraction fan. ...

Nottingham Hackspace had a bit of a whip round at the start of December with the intention of building their own laser cutter to replace their HPC3020 laser cutter. The initial plan was to recreate the basic design from the buildlog website . The pledge pot quickly reached £1000 and some stretch goals were created, within 48 hours the total was up to £2K and the intention is now to build an 80W laser with an 800x450mm cutting area (nearly twice as big as my current machine, twice as powerful but for half the price). The closest design on the buildlog website (or at least the best documented) is this machine by iGull. We intend to copy that design but adding additional features for our specific requirements. Stay tuned as I intend to blog as much of this build as possible and if the control system works out I intend to replace the innards on my own laser to match the design so there is potentially quite a lot invested in this new design. Information about the build can also be fou...

This definitely started as a slightly more involved project but due to time constraints and deadlines (Christmas) it ended up being a 'get it done' project. The arch itself is a Thingiverse item , I started from the SvenS variant which which was already adjusted for 2.6mm laser ply. I had intended to make all the single line cuts into low power etches to speed things up and beef up the tools as well as moving some parts around. As that never really got complete I'll leave you to download the original files, it's a nice little item anyway. 8 projects/ 11 weeks

The vague clock came about because people have different names for different parts of the day. Some people view afternoon as 12pm onwards (which it is) but when does midday start and end? So I decided to jot these all down and put the on the one clock face. It soon became apparent that the AM/PM overlap was going to cause me issues to I decided to slow the whole clock down to perform one rotation every 24 hours. I've left the link as the rather more general pdf format if you want to print your own or just read the witty writings on it, guffaw. ( pdf here ) It's a simple modification to turn the clock into a 24 hour clock. Clock modules are pretty much all the same, a control crystal provides the timing pulses, the coil is energised in one direction and then the other, which causes the magnet on the bottom of the smallest gear to rotate, half a turn per second and appropriate gearing from that point onwards to make all the hands rotate correctly. Simply cuttin...

This post has long been the most viewed post on my entire blog but this design has long been superseded so I just want to make people aware that a better version exists  This kit is available for purchase through my shop  https://msraynsford.ecwid.com/Laser-Cut-Marble-Machine-Kit-p95446965 I present to you my own hand cranked, laser cut marble machine. These are available to purchase as kits, for self assembly and I intend to run some local workshops for them too. The kit includes all the laser cut wooden parts, the nuts and bolts, and enough balls to fill the machine up and spares. Don't forget to check out my other marble machines too A long time ago in a blog not so far away (this one actually) I ran a project where I laser cut one item per day for 365 days. While I was making the machine triggers  and before I'd committed to running my own Donkey Kong machine  there was a suggestion that I should be making kits like this to sell on the day....

A friend of a friend has a broken parcel shelf, but it's from an older car and a getting a replacement would be impossible. So he drew up the part for me and I cut him a replacement section to go into the gap.