MSRaynsford

Halloween feels like a long time ago, but I did make Eli a costume for the night. I copied the rocket man costume that's been floating round the internet. The rocket pack was made from 2 coke bottles and the turbines on the top were laser cut and painted. The fabric for the flames was all laser cut into flame shapes and then sewn onto a spare pair of trousers. For further house decoration I laser cut some eyes into cardboard and rolled them into tube shapes. A glow stick inserted into the middle of the roll illuminated the eyes and I placed them in the hedge row. Finally I programmed a string of neopixels to give a few flashing effects and that really brought the clown face to life.

It's nearly Halloween and I had an afternoon of building fun with the kids trying to make a new decoration. This scary clown will be mounted over our doorway on Monday night ready to greet the trick or treaters. It took about 2 hours all done, 45 minutes drawing, 15 mins cutting and an hour painting and assembly. The face was drawn and split into several different layers which made it easy to give the kids one part and one colour of paint plus adds to the 3D effect. It's just corrugated card and poster paint which makes it cheap and we'll hope for a dry night. ( svg here )

This is my laser cut cryptex. It features 28 different characters and 9 rings, giving a total possible 10.5 Trillion different combinations. I took a bit of time developing the design so that I could add some nice features. This cryptex file is laid out so that you can have any number of rings in your own design. The best feature is that the codeword is changeable, each locking ring has an outer letter ring that can be placed in any one of the 28 different positions. Once the rings are back in place the ring locking bars can added and they prevent the rings from being modified until the box is open again. It's a bit hard to explain so I made a video showing how it all work ( svg here ) It took a long time to assemble this so I lived with my initial design choices but if I were to remake it I would adjust the file to make the ring locking bars out of 6mm ply and maybe put some blind holes onto the code rings to prevent the code being brute forced.

The 1000th project for this blog very much took on a life of its own. I knew I wanted to make something big and impressive so the idea of making 1000 of something had a lot of appeal. The laser makes it very easy to churn out 1000 identical items so I also wanted to make something that needed assembly, something where I had specifically touched all 1000 things. So I built this little shark model , it had a few iterations and eventually ended up with five ribs and a flexible tail. I managed to tessellate 60 onto a  sheet of poplar ply  and I set the machine to cutting out 18 sheets, each sheet taking just over an hour to complete. In between sheets I would pull the parts out of the laser and scoop them into boxes for later assembly. I spent many nights sat in front of the TV assembling parts and in full flow I was assembly one every 45 seconds, so it was roughly another 18 hours for shark assembly. This left me with two,80L crates full of sharks and lots of time to figure o...

This is my 1000th laser cut item. It's nearly my fifth blog anniversary and I wanted to make something epic so I built this shark tank and housed 2 large sharks inside it. Each shark is made from 500 smaller sharks so over the last few weeks I have cut and assembled 1000 of the smaller laser sharks , 1000 things for my 1000th item. Portholes  into the tank allow you to see the sharks from all different angles.

I set out this evening to make a cryptex , it was fairly ambitious given that I also had to pack for New York. Instead all I managed to achieve was a single ring prototype but I figure that is most of the hard work done. This cryptex features a ratchet to make the ring rotate in a single direction. 27 digits, I view the blank character to be equally as important as the other 26, and as this cryptex will be infinitely extendable you could have multiple words in the code. The central section is square which means it doesn't have to be made from 100s of stacked layers.  Most significantly there is an outer ring containing all the letters. The letters are glued into place using a jig  to ensure they are all square on the wheel but the wheel can be rotated in relation to the keyed slots, this means the code word is actually going to be changeable once the cryptex is assembled. Unlocked Locked

I made some bowls before but I lost some of them at the Newcastle Maker Faire this year, as I'm bringing my 'A' game to New York, I thought it was quite sensible to make another one for display. I chose to make another wavy bowl from a single concentric stack. This time the layers had guides to show you where to glue the next layer ( svg here )