MSRaynsford

The school asked me to cut a selection of santa keys for their Christmas fair. It was a simple drawing and cutting keys from my mdf scraps. ( svg here )

The basic car framework  needs a food safe covering to go between the cake and the electronics. Thankfully when I bought my vacuum former  this project was already on the cards so it's a perfect excuse to use it. I laser cut a basic mould from ply and assembled it as a mould to form over. The cake needed to clear the wheels and provide turning clearance for the steering. These covers came out pretty well, the trouble is that vacuum forming works best with a 3 degree angle on the edges and the laser cutter cuts perfectly vertical so it was a bit of a struggle to get the mould out. This was when I introduced an air pump to the vacuum former. Applying a bit of positive pressure after forming releases the mould a little and made it easier to remove.

As well as making my own cake for cake international, I've been rather heavily involved in making these remote control car cakes. Once you add sugar paste icing and a large chunk of cake these things start to weigh quite a lot so moving them round becomes quite a tricky challenge. This car has been through a few iterations before it will go into product development, this is the first version. I decided to use the ESP8266 wifi chip to function as a controller on these devices. They're able to act as a webserver and deliver HTML pages directly to your own device without the need for any kind of app. As most of the people in the cake world seem to use iPhones and I have android seemed the easiest solution. I wanted the car to keep the traditional Ackermann steering mechanism, so I used a servo to directly drive a linkage mechanism. The little 9g servo just about coped with the turning forces but it needed to be enlarged once all the cake was put on top of it ...

I bought some cheap LED clock kits a few years ago, they were good fun to assemble and left me with a perfectly serviceable clock for the kids rooms. I opted not to buy the (nasty plastic) case because it was laser cut and I could make my own, move forward a few years and today seemed like a good time to actually do that. It's a simple wooden box really with holes in the correct places, the clock module slides in loosely from the front and wedges in place with some foam. The plastic panel slides into some grooves along the front of the box. It's transparent grey plastic  so the LED's can shine through it. The grooves on the front mean that the burnt side is out on the top of the clock, I should have masked it to reduce those marks. Being wooden I can easily glue it to the underside of my shelves next to my hooky hooks ( svg here )

As is their right, the blood and oil guys decided to go with acrylic for their counters . The acrylic is a bit trickier to glue together and all of the lettering has to be done with infill techniques . I decided to opt out of the assembly process for these and instead supply bags full of parts :)

I made this simple, magnet free version of a score tracker for Blood and Oil . I used 0.8mm birch  for the front and back panels and 3mm poplar for the middle layer. The lettering was done with Hershey text to make it as fast as possible and the emblem is a combination of engraving and outlining. The idea was to make these as quick as possible for a batch order but I also liked the super skinny style. 

A family of large meeples from 12mm plywood, coloured before cutting. I really should mask the reverse or clean my honeycomb to make them look better after cutting. A customised start tile for Carcassonne. Somebody wants to use a set as a guest book for their weddings, having the guests write messages on the rest of the tiles. A quick stencil for painting some fabric. It's for a cosplay costume, possibly one of the super hero suits? Finally here is the days orders, a mixture of marble machines, kits and other custom parts (like the meeples)