MSRaynsford

The laser is very good at whipping up a batch of gears for steampunk decorations . I've done gears before  but it's actually quicker to draw new ones than the find the old files. ( svg here )

Last in request and completion. This spoon loitered at the bottom of the todo list so it's not a major surprise I overlooked it while doing the other trophies. It's a standard engrave for the logo and low power cut for the text, I am quite surprised at how well it came out though consider it is all a curved surface. Clearly a few mm in either direction of focus doesn't make a vast difference, I doubt the same could be said if I was trying to cut all the way through.

I was asked to sell a double wide useless machine , which I foolishly agreed to and then realised that machine was based on Version 1.5 and my machine is now up to Version 2, so I spent the evening bringing this design up to Version2.0 as well. It wasn't too challenging and it made me realise just how versatile this clip together box is, parametric design is definitely on my todo list now. 

My gaming cabinet is now complete. I wired up all the internals and got the controller working (Pandoras Box 3 520 Games in 1). I was keen to get it all finished today so end up with a few more 'functional' decisions than I would have liked but now that the front bezel is in place and it's actually playable I can live with them for a few months. There is a relatively large cable loom and clearly practice makes perfect on these things. Player 2 (left and controls) already looks better than Player 1. I re jigged the layout a few times but in the end was quite pleased with it. The system is run from an ATX power supply but I wasn't happy with the dozen empty cables floating around so I opened up the supply and cut out all the unnecessary connections leaving only the +12V, +5V and GND cables coming out the supply.  All that was left to do was load up Donkey Kong and take a few working shots for the blog.

So what was I squeezing out of yesterdays material , these 4 war gaming trophies. I've used a layered effect to turn the logo into a 3D trophy, the plaque is cut from silver/black HIPS and built onto a 6mm poplar base to make them stand upright. The keen eyed amongst you may notice that trophies are for 2nd and 3rd places, there is a fancier trophy for 1st place but I promised to keep that under wraps until the 12th December when the tournament is held.

Due to reasons I cut the first of four items from a sheet of 3mm laser ply (instead of 2.7mm nominal). When I was looking through my materials I couldn't find a second sheet so I was left with the task of squeezing the rest of my cuts out of a sheet with holes in. In order to maximise the material I ended up drawing the sheet with approximations of the holes in it and then laying out the new cuts around those. Sure it would be simpler if I had a webcam in the lid to take a shot of the new sheet but this at least demonstrates it can be done the manual way. I've now got all the parts I need to assemble the other three items, all cut from the same material. You'll notice that some of the sections are coloured. This is my trick for making coloured items quickly. Paint the sheet the desired colour and then cut the items out of it. Cutting the sheet out while leaving the frame in place allows me to quickly realign the sheets when they go back into the laser.

In what feels like an eternity ago and delays entirely of my own making I ran these logo tests  for newspeak house . Well tonight I finally got round to cutting 25 of the silver logos to be stuck on the back of chalkboard erasers, I think they'll add a nice little bit of class in a time when chalk boards just don't receive as much love as they used to.