MSRaynsford

I'm alive, I'm busy but I am still alive. The laser is working reasonably well but I'm keeping a close eye on it just to make sure it doesn't spark again. It probably needs a clean and some calibration too so lots to keep me busy. I am doing a few custom jobs for people so thought I'd post this up here. I was asked to make some Escher fishes but slightly larger than the other ones. A quick dash of scale factor later and voila, bigger fish, just one of the perks of computer aided manufacture.

I recently bought a copy of Artemis , the space ship bridge simulator. I intend to play it with various groups of friends so if that wasn't geeky enough I felt we needed to have some com badges to go alongside the system. As it only took 2 hours from start to finish it's not even like it was a massive waste of time :) 15 should see us right for quite some time. ( svg here )

I've been keeping myself pretty busy for the last few weeks but unfortunately for you guys my laser cutter has now developed a fault. For a long time now my laser has been playing up, it appears to be a problem with data corruption between my PC and the laser. Files can cut fine one day but download it again and the laser fails (in the on state) and draws a line right across the piece I'm working on. Well in between those failures the machine has developed a second fault. The insulating shield on the laser tube has now failed. Large sparks were jumping from the tube straight to the laser case. Obviously this is not a good thing and the laser stopped cutting anyway so I investigated and found the smouldering lump of rubber pictured about. I don't know why it did this, but I turned the tube around in an effect to keep running. That worked for a few hours but then it started sparking from the same place. It's not all bad news HPC were coming down to visit my...

KateMonkey has done me the honour of a fantastic introduction for a workshop I intend to run at Nottinghack next week. There's not that much to it beyond that, but I intend to start at 7pm on Tuesday 12th of Feb and hand out kits of Marble Machines #1 , Marble Machines #2 , and Useless Machines and then float around the space offering advice to anyone who gets confused by my instructions. I expect this to be many people but I will come away and improve the instructions for all people. If you're within reach of Nottingham then we'd love to have you come along and visit us in the hackspace and I believe there may well be pancakes on offer too.

Nearly a year ago now I drew up these three jewellery   stands , they are one of the most commonly requested items that I never released. The trouble was that parts of the design were too thin. Inkscape has an easy feature to get round this, you can 'outset' a path which makes each of the lines thicker and the holes smaller. The trouble is that each time I outset the file the parts started to overlap each other and it just became one big blob. So I learnt a valuable lesson about saving over the original files and keeping the construction lines in each of my designs and I only just got round to redrawing them from scratch so here they are. Stand 1 , Stand 2 , Stand 3 13 Projects/ 17 Weeks

I just had it confirmed that my application to attend the UK Maker Faire 2013 has been successful. The faire runs on April 27th and April 28th, although I intend to go up the day before and come home the day after. I'll be running as MSRaynsford and exhibiting a selection of laser cut items including  marble machines , useless machines , and most importantly a revamped version of Mechanical Donkey Kong If you want to come visit me then I'd recommend the Saturday, the whole event is 3 days before the due date for our second child and I could be dashing off at any moment. Hope to see you there.

After making up the photo frames from Project #5  I was left with 130 cut outs from the middle of the frames. I always felt like they were dog tag sized and now I have the perfect use for them. A friend wanted some tokens for a group he is organising, the artwork has popped up here before  but this time they are smaller and made with real wood which is much nicer.  12 projects /16 weeks