MSRaynsford

Ever since I made my version of one of  Sam Lauren Smiths inky drawings, it has been stuck to our kitchen wall, waiting for me to get a much bigger laser so I could cut one at the size I wanted it (1.2m long). The more I looked at it the less I liked the burnt wood on wood effect until finally one day I decided that I should just go ahead and get a proper black and white canvas job done. I contacted the artist again but still didn't hear anything so I went ahead and used my own scanned images of the postcard. This is where Chris Braunston of Braunston Ltd  printing company comes in. He's my guru for all things print related and he's help me make custom Tshirts and vinyl Wall stickers before. They do canvas printing and were happy for me to go down and watch/help the whole process. A big print job requires a big printer and this one prints directly to the canvas. It was fairly straight forward, a program adds some margin around the edge of the image to ...

One day, I rested my lizard spiral pattern on my lack side table and an idea was born. I scaled up the spiral, found a fourth colour of 'Antique Pine', so I could add a plain/white border around the edge of the image and I was ready to laser cut and assemble. As usual I had to cut 3 different colour sets at once and then assemble them all back together, so now I have 3 Escher side tables floating around my house. This item is not available for sale. Each lizard was individually laser cut in the 3 different colours. I sanded the top of the lack table to key the surface of the table and help the glue stick to it. The border was rather large so I split it into 4 parts to go round the edge of the table. The four largest lizards interlock nicely with the border and hold it in place while the glue sets. Afterwards it's easiest to build up the lizards in rings working towards the centre. Once you're at the middle you can fit the centre piece with a ...

The material wheel was previously finished to my satisfaction but not to the customers. It's hung around for a while so I prodded until I got some answers about how it was to be finished. A few of the pictures changed and the whole thing was to be black ink washed. I actually mixed some silver into the black to give it a bit of sheen. The final item looks quite different so I thought I'd post it again, I definitely hit the brief to make an bowl with 8 sections that looks like a wheel.

My first collaboration. When I made my first marble machine , it was spurred on by the busted bricks marble machine released a few months sooner. Michael went off and modified his marble machine to produce a simpler version using purely laser cut parts, and 10mm ball bearings. In the meantime I struggled to produce a staircase version of my own so when I heard that Michael was closing shop and leaving the country I enquired about producing a variant of his kit. He cracked all the hard work but I polished it up a bit, exposed the marbles on the staircase and most significantly added a motor to the works.  This kit is now available for sale in my shop .

In an effort to drum up a few January sales and hopefully break even this month I'm now offering free worldwide shipping for the rest of January. Just order it through the shop and you'll see that the shipping will be zero. I'll even extend that to custom orders but you'll just have to trust me that I'm secretly adding it in to your quote. http://msraynsford.myshopify.com/

The extraction on my HPC 3060 is terrible, I've mentioned it before  but since I've had a second machine to compare it against it is much more obvious how bad it is. The Blacknose  has the extraction outlet immediately behind the work and you can see the fumes going up it. The outlet on the 360 is in the back of the laser at the bottom with a grill in the way. The fumes are expected to go round a bend cumulate in a small area and be drawn out of the hole in the back of the machine. Combine this with the fact their is no obvious way for the air to be drawn into the machine and it just lingers around, which probably helps explain why my machine got so sticky in the first place. So I've got a 3 phase approach, phase 1 is to find some way to put new air into the machine. I've decided to pump some air into the front of the laser. I can lift the lid a whole 15mm without affecting the magnetic switch, and without exposing gaps down the side of the lid so the smoke w...

With the relative success of the Hooky hooks , I extended my hanging from shelf range to include my wire spools. I wanted to be able to remove the spools individually and make the hanger generic enough to take the 2-3 sizes of reel I have. This design has a sturdy interlocking cross bar strong enough to hold the reel and the hooks are snug enough to stop the bar jumping out randomly. ( svg here )