MSRaynsford

The Stellated Dodecahedron is back , there was a lot of interest in it at the maker faire and someone even went as far as buying a kit so I figured I better get it working properly. Last time I only cut one but I couldn't really sell it because the material was wrong. I had some 1.5mm ply which was clearly exterior ply and not interior ply so the edges were so horrendously burnt and sooty that it smudged everything. This time around and Kitronik is now stocking 1.5mm Birch that is definitely laserable. So with the right material this thing makes a decent kit, I even managed to make the finger joints so snug that it doesn't need glue to hold together. Puzzle Kits are available from my store  (£12).

By request I was asked to etch an A4 sized stark wolf with a 'Graham of Thrones' caption. I used my prior artwork  which is pretty to the picture sent to me which sped things up a lot. Having a nice clean line drawing allowed me to quickly raster it, to get a version without overlapping tufts and then re vectorise it (the updated 'trace bitmap' in Inkscape is incredible). The image was first engraved but it didn't pop enough for my liking so I put it back in (I hadn't moved the surrounding frame) and outlined the engraving as well. I took the decision to not etch the teeth and to only outline them which I think makes them stand out a bit from the picture. Anyway customer is happy and so am I.

I've been wanting to use this landscape depth technique thing for quite some time now, I have a monthly project in progress right now that uses it but while I was doing that I thought it would be pretty cool to make this pair of frames with the positive and negative images in them. The perspex is often labelled as Glass Green which gives a slightly false impression. The backing sheet is green and it gives the whole thing a lovely green tint. In reality this is the clearest perspex sheet I've ever seen and all the green tint goes away when the backing is removed. It's really good though if you want a Glass like material. I got it from Kitronik  (again)

I must confess that I got a little bit distracted and carried away when Eli asked me to make him a Lego car yesterday. In case you haven't seen Fury Road I recommend you go and see it on the big screen it's weird, cool and it'll lose a lot of impact on the small screen. I fiddled and faffed with a few Lego pieces and was reminded of the film, from there I ended up making 6 vehicles based upon the ones in the film. It gets a little bit image heavy from here on down so to save my regular blog readers I'm hiding it below the cut

A ye olde board game board for a game called Gluckhaus , this was cut on request for a LRP game . The material is an oak veneered plywood that is now available from Kitronik , it worked really well for this. There are a few knots and lumps and bumps that are a bit tougher to get through but as I'm only going to be making one of these that's fine. 

Another simple rubber stamp, the more I do the more I learn about what not to do with these things. I should probably write something useful about how to do stamps. As much as I like having a full square background it's probably time to concede that the excess rubber should be cut as close to the stamp as possible.

The last of my line art experiments from last week. For this one I varied the densities of the lines radiating from the centre. The effect is much more significant than I imagined. Again I failed to cover the centre of the pattern so it burnt a hole in the middle. Maybe a sun circle in the middle of this patter. No I just need to find time to write the instructable for it.