MSRaynsford

Sometimes I get sales from people with interesting sounding email addresses and postal addresses. Occasionally I'll google these people and see what they're up to. This has led to some interesting conversations and discoveries, such as someone who worked with super slow motion videos and even a saucy underwear site. This most recent order led me to Artists market  and in particular Eschers Fish and Frogs . These frogs all vary slightly to each other as they progress down the page so they all had to be drawn individually. Initially they were cut in the two different wood types I have to hand. I felt the contrast wasn't strong enough so I painted half of them black, I mounted them onto an mdf sheet to hold them sturdy. As a bonus (and with a little bit more effort) I was able to extract 1 frog and 1 fish and to modify them so that they tessellate with each other and I can form whole sheets of fish and frogs. ( svg for singles here ) 44 Projects/ 48 Weeks ...

I got a few new games for my birthday last week. After one play through of Agricola  I realised it would be helpful to have some storage bins for the many many components. I came up with this 15 bin arrangement that fits neatly into the box. Two rows of 5 bins are joined together and hold all the resources, each bin has an icon to represent the resource it holds. 5 separate bins were placed in the middle to hold the player tokens. These can be lifted and given to each person individually, a little coloured dot on the back of each bin indicates what colour counters should go into the bin. 43 Projects/ 48 Weeks

While travelling all the UK maker faires this year I end up talking to loads and loads of people about their ideas and things that could be made with the laser cutter. Most people take my business card and are never heard of again. Simon and Andrea however got back in touch with me. When they saw the Escher lizards they thought that the Isle of Man legs would lend themselves well to being laser cut as coasters. They linked me to a vector image of the flag and the rest is history. I cut this as 2 separate parts to get the different coloured material around the outside.

I have already taken one shot at the Iron Man 3 arc reactor, but that was back before the film was released and the only shot we had of the arc was through Tony Starks T-shirt. Since then Marvel has released some official merchandise and there is a short scene in the film where Tony walks around with a torn shirt with the arc out. Most of the arcs I've seen are just basic triangles but I wanted to include some of those line details on my new arc. I had to put 2 layers of details on the arc, the basic triangle is on silver engraving laminate, the second layer is clear acrylic and the line details really catch the light coming through from behind. The colour is the hardest part, the arc is cyan, but Cyan LED's appear green. To get round this problem I'm actually using RGB LED's and I turn on the blue and the green LED's at the same time. Because of this there are actually twice as many LED's in the arc and it shines uber bright. The batteries won't last...

A natural extension of the useless machine , it's just a small logical step to put 2 arms inside the same box. There is a place between the two 'on' positions of a toggle switch where neither side is actually on. From this precarious position even a little bump can cause the switch to fall into one of the on positions, leaving the arms to battle it out forever. It's very similar in principle to the other machine, all simple electronics and wiring. The toggle switch crosses over the battery wires to change the direction of the motors. Each arm only moves forward when the opposite limit switch pushed. ( svg here ) These machines are available as kits through my shop 41 Projects / 47 Weeks

This is the epic kind of project I imagine for next years 12 in 12 but for some reason I squeezed it into a weekly project, not ideal when I'm so far behind but sometimes these things just need to be done. It expands upon the resource holder I made last week. Using the same artwork as the icons on each of the tiles, I created ports and sea tiles in the same theme. All the tiles are made from laser ply, with veneer on top. The sea tiles are a nice blue stained veneer. Each tile has 12 magnets embedded into it, 2 for each side, arranged so they alternate between north and south, this allows the tiles to snap together at any angle and also allows the tiles to click into a stack. (see the video below). The complete set of tiles uses about 500 magnets. I'm seriously thinking about kickstarting this as a set for people to purchase, multiple preorders should help bring the price down to something reasonable. 40 Projects / 47 Weeks  

As a custom request I cut some A5 sized lizards from 6mm laser ply. The lizards are a redraw of Eschers design using a computer program to recreate the tessellations (Written by the customer). They worked first time without any tweaking, so I would say it was a good test result for his design.