MSRaynsford

I gave a little talk at Starbase Leicester last night about how modern manufacturing had reached the hobbyist market and that local hackspaces were now filled with CNC mills, laser cutters and 3D printers amongst other useful things. I tried to tie this all in to the cosplay that they were doing and I hope it filled them with ideas about what is actually possible with access to the right tools. I showed some of my laser cut pepakura but I also drew and laser cut a paper version of a companion cube. The plan was that people would help me assemble it and the space would get to keep it. In the best laid plans of these things that never really happened so I came home with a box full of paper parts. While watching some TV I thought I would assemble it. After a few hours of show and only having one corner made I realised that I just don't have time for this kind of thing anymore. If I'm invested in a project I will make the time but something disposable like this object would b...

You can buy a 40W laser cutter for less than £1000 and I recently acquired one of these cheap machines. There are many internet horror stories about these things and even though this one was provided in a non functional state it's still easy to see why the horror stories exist. I've given it a quick look over and these are my first impressions. I'm just going to talk about the actual hardware because the reviews of Moshidraw say that it is unintuitive, poorly translated and largely unusable, I haven't even bothered to install it because I want this machine to have an open source controller anyway. The Good The Price, similar models are priced about £500 on ebay. The layout, it's a sturdy metal box all wired up nicely Complexity,  it's a very simple machine which should make it easy to spot any issues.   The Bad - minor niggles that you can live with but shouldn't have to Manual Power,  manual power gives you a lot of control but sof...

I met Sarah  through Leicester hackspace, she's done some really amazing paper cuts but now she is trying to find a way to cut them automagically instead of doing it all by hand. We ended up talking about vinyl cutters vs laser cutters and I came away to test patterns on the laser to see if they were possible. They cut really well with minimal burning and soot. The items themselves are mounts to go on photos and I can see them selling like hot cakes.

John  runs a tavern at Empire and he wants a new pub sign to go out the front. He tasked me to cut a series of letters to stick on the sign. Given some of his awesome instructables projects I can't wait to see this stuck together and finished, I'll add photos asap.

(I have elaborated on the control system used in this project over on instructables) The Z axis control on the Lasercut system has some features I don't really like.  It's slow when you're trying to go large distances. You have to be right at the top menu before you can enter Z mode, but the top menu and the one below it are both identical so you end up pressing escape before hand just to make sure. Once in Z mode pressing escape does not get you out of Z mode, only pressing Z again does. Holding the Up/Down button for 3 seconds switches to a faster speed but this typically occurs once you reach the exact spot you wanted to be in and the Z zooms out of the desired position. You can't adjust the Z axis while the program is paused, meaning you have to stop, adjust and restart whereby you double cut a series of lines. If you don't datum the Z axis, which it doesn't do automatically, the Z doesn't even run continuously. Check the end of the vid...

Tree requested these plastic templates for some leather belts he's making. He cuts round the template to make the end shape on leather belts. The white one has funny rounded ends where Lasercut 5.3 failed to read in the dxf correctly. I thought it made an interesting shape and it was already cut so he might as well have them both.

The first Empire LARP event of the year happens this easter, I'm reminded of this because people are requesting laser cut items already. I made these Rune tags before but they were all given out. This batch has the game year inscribed on the bottom which hopefully means a repeat order next year too :)