MSRaynsford

While I was tessellating lizards for snowflakes I had a sudden bright idea. You could arrange dozens of lizards to form a wreath shape and you'd have one of the geekiest wreaths I've ever seen. Green lizards form the backdrop with red lizards scattered over the top as berries. I also made a second variant with concentric circles, if I were to do it again I would probably arrange the colours to spiral out from the middle.

I've been meaning to clean my laser for a while now but I was pretty busy before Christmas, my honeycomb has also become pretty manky so based on some recommendations I found on a laser forum (can't remember where) I bought some Krud Kutter, concentrated cleaner. I Diluted some 50:50 with water and sprayed it over the honeycomb. Turns out spraying it was not very effective but I was amazed at how easily the stains came off the edge metal. I turned the spray bottle onto the rest of the machine and was surprised at how fast the whole thing cleaned up. I even got round to cleaning out the bed. The bed has been building up crap and stains since day 1. Previous attempts left it pretty black and took a lot of effort so I basically turned a blind eye to it (hence the title). I sprayed it with Krud Kutter and left it for a few minutes and I noticed that the tar was shifting. I kept on at it, using wood offcuts as scrapers and although it took an hour of hard graft the final re...

So with Christmas out of the way I can now show more of the things I've been working on over the last few weeks. Admittedly most of my time was spent fulfilling orders for various items, the Christmas surge was a little overwhelming. Turns out you can arrange lizards into snowflake formations, leaving one out the middle makes for a pretty pattern too. These got made but never went anywhere, I'll make more next year and hang them up in our windows.

I drew a new snowflake for this year to give to relatives for Christmas, it was safer to draw new ones because I couldn't remember who got what last year ( svg here )

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...