MSRaynsford

I now have a whitetooth laser cutter stashed in my garage, with it's 80W laser tube I know it was capable of cutting 12mm laser ply at a decent speed (18mm/s) but I hadn't actually got round to making anything out of it. I decided to break into my pile of 12mm ply by making a very very large version of my marble machine. 40mm wooden balls now roll around a quadruple sized version of MM1.  In other news the double sized marble machine is now available from my shop .

I tried to run a kickstarter style campaign to build up to the release of my Carcassonne files. For numerous reasons we never actually reached the £500 I was hoping to get, but I have decided to release the files anyway to the people that participated. I will continue on with my running total and once I reach the required amount I will release the files into the wild, but for the mean time you can still purchase them for a small £10 payment. £350/£500 raised Purchase the Carcassonne files from here.

A fairly hefty picture post from me tonight. I've been involved in a very large project for the last 6 weeks. I've had a few teaser posts about it already but yesterday was the big set up day. Dinkydoodle Designs  wanted to build a massive exhibition cake to show at Cake International 2014  but always wanting to wow the visitors Dawn decided to make the cakes move which is where I got drafted in. I designed, built, wired and programmed all the internals and these wonderful cake creations were built upon my bases. The show will run for 3 days and will finish on Sunday if you want to head over and see these things for yourself. I'm going to run a short series of blog posts showing all the mechanisms as they got up to this point and explaining how each one was put together but at its heart most of these system boil down down to an arduino and a 15kg torque servo.                

I was inspired by this instructable  by pohhoushun to have a go at making my own church window. You can really get into it once you start adding all the little details over everything. I've ended up with an amazing little window and I'm inspired to make more, what a super idea.

A custom request that I managed to squeeze in this afternoon (sorry it's slow round here but there is a massive project under way). The request was that the cake topper has spikes that would hold it up in the cake but could be removed to make it a nice item after the birthday. I've managed to get both at once by using a spikey font :)

I wrote an instructable last night which rounds up a lot of my board gaming type posts. http://www.instructables.com/id/Laser-Cut-Board-Games/ It was also supposed to inspire people to support my jumpstart campaign for Carcassonne files so consider this a gentle nudge for my blog readers too http://msraynsford.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/kickstart-me-carcassonne.html

I'm often asked to offer comparison between laser cutters 'X' and 'Y'. I feel it's important to try and offer impartial advice, we do have our own laser importing business after all so it would be very easy to be biased. The trouble is that I'm not sure what people are really asking when they want two machines compared so I thought I'd write a little blog post to talk about the basic comparison and discuss the most important thing that people always overlook. Laser cutters are often presented alongside a pretty dull technical spec sheet. This is straight forward list of details about laser power, cutting area and cutting speeds, sometimes it also includes price. I would hope that most people are able to do these comparisons for themselves. Bigger cutting area is better, more laser power is better and often comes at an increased price.  This is where the question confuses me. The only information I have about the other laser cutter is this d...