MSRaynsford

The kids grew some pretty epic sunflowers over the summer and we harvested the seeds to grow some more next year (third year running actually). We decided to share the seeds with people for Christmas and I laser cut a load of packets to go with them. The details were printed onto the paper with a standard laser printer, as you can see from the close ups the cut lines were incredibly close to the printed lines. The trick is to let the laser cut a hole to show you where to put the sheets of paper.

I ran across this game called Cephalopod on the  Mark Steere Games website. It's a fun two player game that doesn't take too long to learn. I built the play area with indents to hold the dice in location and I build a tray underneath large enough to hold all 48 die, I put a little spacer into the tray to fill the void where the 49 die would be and to stop them rattling around. ( svg here )( rules here )

Slate is one of the materials that I knew could be laser engraved but I just never got round to doing it (I've had some slate coasters for years but we have a functional old table and don't use coasters). So when I was asked to do a house sign I jumped at the chance. It's a simple design but it came up lovely. I even marked where the holes should drilled (but decided not to drill it myself). The best thing is that I was sent 2 pieces of slate in case of accident and I got it right first time so now I have my own piece to play with (or leave on the shelf for years with the coasters).

I wanted to up my game and make some really fancy tree decorations this year. Laser cutting is very popular this year but a lot of the designs you can buy are just cut straight onto laser ply. I opted for real woods this year, 3mm thick, Spruce, Bass and Mahogany. I test these in ply and then cut them in wood and realised that the best way to make them stand out would be multiple woods in each design.  With 3 base colours I could also mix and match a few designs.   ( svg here ) As you'll have noticed the blog is a bit slower than it used to be while I work upon the vanillabox  but there will be good things coming in the new year, so until then merry Christmas and a happy new year. 

I recently saw someone using the Amaziograph app for the iPad, it allows you to create drawings with rotational symmetry and people were making really fancy doily shapes by swiping their finger across the screen. I knew it would lend itself well to line art but as I investigated these apps I discovered they were all raster based and wouldn't easily give vector artwork that could be cut so I had to find another way.  It's fairly straight forward to replicate in Inkscape. Inkscape allows you to clone an object and the clones all update when the original changes. I drew a simple line and then cloned it dozens of times, arranging them all with rotational symmetry. As I modified the base line, all the other lines updated and these interesting patterns grew in complexity. The drawing was already vectored so it was easy to get it across to the laser. The whole pattern was cut in a single laser line so I filmed the process too. ( svg here )

About a week ago I made this puzzle box as a prop for a LRP event, I've kept it back just in case someone saw it in advance. It's a great little build and a good puzzle, I won't expand on the details yet because I may be working with the creator to make more puzzle boxes via kickstarter but in the meantime you can get an idea of it from this video (and that's enough breadcrumbs if you really want to know more).

I end up making some pretty odd things with the laser and these 'Bump & Grind' knuckle dusters rate pretty highly. It's LARP related (obviously) so they're made of foam to be soft enough to wear. They still need latexing and they're probably too small for anyone with sensible sized hands but the joy of the laser is that you can scale things up easily.