MSRaynsford

Another map of vale, this time for the organisers to keep. This one is etched onto a beech veneered plywood, the same material as the star was cut from. It's 600x600mm  and 6mm thick, I rounded all the edges to make it nice to handle.

I'm falling behind with projects, possibly due to having 3 maker faires and 1 LRP event in a 5 week period meaning my August disappeared. This was a spur of the moment project for Brighton Mini Maker Faire at the weekend just gone. It went well though and the kids really loved it so it's now undergoing a complete redesign to make it stronger and sturdier, which I'll need in time for my Cambridge Hackspace workshop next weekend. I've taken my mini catapults to maker faires for quite some time now but they tend to get overlooked especially when we tell kids not to fire ball bearings at us. This time round I thought it would be cool if we had something they could actually shoot at, we could then cut mini catapults on the laser and hopefully sell a few more of both. I built a small range on a slope with 10 targets to shoot at, the idea being that the balls would roll back to the kids and a small motorised mechanism would stand the targets back up again. Testing and c...

The green material is a self adhesive tape backed with a sheet of acetate. We were asked if it would be possible to cut the tape off the acetate and leave the plastic sheet behind. I've cut paper tape from it's backing before  but plastic on plastic is something new. I ran a quick test with the 80W laser and to my surprise the sheet actually cut and didn't just melt or fuse together. It marked the backing on the corners a little bit more than I hoped but I reckon if this was done with a 30W laser you would be able to get it perfect.

A quick laser cut sign for someone heading to the gathering  this weekend, I assume he's intending to run some sort of coffee stall.

Once the corners were tested and proven to work I was able to proceed in making an extra large version of the stellated dodecahedron. It was a bit of a rush because it is headed to Solfest  this weekend but if you're there you may well see it. I built it so quickly I had enough time to take it to Bristol Maker Faire .  Even though each star was cut from a 600x600mm panel it still feels a little on the small size. The original looks teeny next to it but I'm secretly hoping we'll be making a much larger one at some point in the future (even if that one can't be laser cut)

Things were a bit hectic last week before Vale so I don't appear to have any construction photos of this item but it's 5 layers of lasercut LD45. The nut was made by wrapping a detailed piece of foam around the bar. The whole thing was plasti dipped instead of latexed so it came out a bit harder than desired but it's not like I actually get into combat at these things anyway.

Andy from Travelling Light Circus saw my stellated dodecahedron  at Manchester Makefest and he decided that he wanted a much bigger one. So I got to work straight away proving that I could make a corner joint for a star that was 4 times bigger. I used a 3D model to figure out what the angles should be and I used button hex bolts to reduce the amount of tinkering members of the public could do to it. I used a T-Slot joints to hold the stars onto the framework. One thing that has always bugged me about T-Slots is the way the nut can fall out of the slot, to overcome this issue I made the nuts captive with another piece of wood. The nut outer is glued into place in the T-Slot so there is no way the nut can fall out, particularly useful when the joints are going to be at all sorts of funny angles in the star.