MSRaynsford

This weekend just gone I was exhibiting at the Model Engineers Exhibition , at Sandown Race Course. A whole bunch of makers were invited to the show to exhibit our crazy new fangled tools and projects. It was a pretty good exercise in bridging the divide between makers and model engineers. We're both the same anyway just working on different things. I genuinely had a great time, the whole thing had a feel of a maker faire but with far less children and many more of the adults already knew the technology existed. I went down on Friday with a stall full of laser cut items and a few kits for sale. I pretty much sold everything I'd taken on the first day(yay for covering my hotel expenses etc). On Saturday Dominic brought our new laser cutter down and we were able to demonstrate the machine in action. We just ran Christmas cards all day because cardboard doesn't produce a lot of fumes and they're pretty cheap to give away. For the first time ever I had nice thi...

So late last week I was introduced to a game called Heredox , it's a simple tile game that is available as an app on you phone, tablet and probably wrist watch nowadays. The introduction came with a request to make a physical copy of the game to. I looked at it for a bit, thought I could do something nice with it and then took the job. I'm really pleased with the results even if it did take a few iterations to get it right. The tiles are created by etching off the surface to leave the symbols behind in a very similar way to the fields on my  Carcassonne  tiles. The problem is that some of the symbols need to be white and some of them need to be black and this is on the same time.  Etching then painting each tile individually is a fiddly job that I'd rather not do, so I devised a template that showed me where I should be painting the tiles. I needed a trick that would allow me to realign all the tiles at once. Only cutting the border allows me to pick up all t...

So this was one of the big pieces of news I hinted at last week. We ordered a laser cutter from China for evaluation purposes. The intention was to bring them in, commission them and sell them on to makers and hobbyists. This machine has a larger than A4 cutting area (260mm x 320mm), air assist, Z axis, newlydraw controller and a few other mod cons, such as honeycomb bed and twin laser dots for focal alignment. It was intended as our entry level machine but by the time we've cleaned it up checked it over and added a small markup the margins were just too tight. This machine did have a home in mind but that person can no longer afford it so that leaves us with a brand new laser cutter that we're looking to sell and recover our costs from.  If you're looking for a machine at Chinese import prices but without the faff and hassle of having to import it yourself then this is the machine for you. It's now available on ebay so why not snag yourself a pre Christmas bar...

From time to time I do oddities for other people. I lasered up this foam tsuba to go into a LARP weapon and last week I finally managed to track down the results and the completed sword. So I nabbed their photos for you guys. They've gone down well and I've been asked for a repeat order which is always a good thing. The rest of the sword and latexing and stuff was done by Eldritch  who make weapons and other props for LARP

I finally got round to fixing the files from my Carcassonne set and I'm now ready to sell them as accessories to go along with your original copy of the tile game. They're compatible with the actual tiles too so you'll still be able to play all of the expansions and if there is enough interest I could add the river expansion to my collection (let me know if you want that). Tiles are now available for purchase from my shop      

Well that was a fairly epic year and another stupid challenge. For anyone just tuning in I set myself the challenge of making 52 large items within 52 weeks. I later went on to define a large item as any project that took 10 hours or more. This was stupid because it added another 10 hours of work a week to my 32 hour day job, 2 small children, busy maker faire/LRP schedule and stream of internet orders. I ended up completing 51 items in 52 weeks (largely due to confusion about dates) and I finished the final item a week later. I realised I'd fallen quite a long way behind  in mid August, and I resolved to catch up by finishing things I'd started but that left me needing to complete 3 items a week. I kept the new pace up relatively well so I was a bit disappointed when I discovered the project finished a week sooner than I thought it did. I actually made 5 out of the 6 remaining items in that final week and I genuinely think some of it was my best stuff . My favou...