MSRaynsford

A request from one of my readers, who works with my uncle. Justin wanted some X wing movement templates for the game . He drew all the files, we selected some plastic and I gave it a whirl. I'm not entirely happy with the outcome, it's a bit too hard to read the engraving because the plastic is so dark (it looked lighter on the ebay listing) and some of the curves are a bit flat due to import errors on my laser cutter. There has been interest already though so I expect we'll be correcting these issues soon.

The Tsuba is a round guard at the of the sword grip that stops you getting your fingers chopped off. They were fairly decorative and people have been trying to put them on LRP weapons. After seeing my engraving test  I was asked if I could make one for somebody. I duly complied and now I've made a nice guard for from 12mm LD45 foam, I can wait to see it latexed and complete.

Anyone who has seen me at a maker faire recently might have seen a predecessor of this little catapult design. I've been wanting to make one for a while but I just never seemed to get the parts right. I sat down and gave it some serious effort this week and I came up with this one. The power is all supplied from a skein of 1mm nylon string and it packs enough oomph to kick the little balls all the way across my office at work. ( svg here ) 46 Projects/ 49 Weeks

Yes it's another Escher, but after my discussion with Jeff from the artists market last week he linked me to this one and told me it was his favourite piece. I naturally was reluctant to do yeat another Escher but as I looked at it I couldn't figure out the symmetry pattern. The pattern then turned into a challenge and I started to draw it so I could work it out. I turned the final piece into a tray puzzle and painted each fish by hand. It's only when I put it up here and tried to find a reference for it I've discovered it's one of a set  (don't worry I won't be doing those for a while) ( svg for tessellation here ) 45 Projects /49 Weeks It's another twofer though. The more I do Escher conversions the more I realise that Escher shapes don't really tessellate, this is because they never really needed to. When they're drawn on paper you can just adjust the next shape so that they fit together. To make them tessellate I have to take the ...

A blast from the past, I've done these hearts before  but for some reason they were only one colour. I had a request for 4 using the 3 different colours and they looked really good so I figured I should post them up again, just to show you what I've been working on. There were also 500 lizards that went along with this order but I forgot to photo them before I wrapped them up, a busy weekend for me. 

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