MSRaynsford

In one aspect of Vale I'm making tech to keep the node system functional, from the player side of things I'm trying to find ways to hit as many nodes as possible and collect all the stuff. While you're waiting at a node it would be really useful to know how long it had been since the node last spawned. There is a 6 hour window for 3 spawns so it's going to be roughly every 2 hours. I thought it would be handy to drop these counters near the node so anyone can update the time then, if you arrive 10 minutes after the previous drop it's worth going on to the next node. They're based on this wound counter design but two concentric rings allows me to set the hour and the minutes separately.

I'm deep into fulfilment for my kickstarter puzzles. Roughly 600 puzzles to make in total and I'm turning over about 50 a day which is pretty good progress. Obviously it's leaving me a little bit of time to blog this month which is why I'm catching up on posts.  The high quality BR grade plywood from Kitronik is really worth the extra money. 1 in 10 sheets has the tiniest of knots but because each ply is only 0.5mm thick it still cuts through cleanly. All the inner layers are equally high standard. If your working on a project that needs better materials this is the stuff to go for.

The fathers day lorry is very similar to most of the cars we've already done but to really make it feel like a proper truck is needed some mud guards over the wheels. It would be hard to laser cut something directly to go over them but thanks to the vacuum former I can laser cut some moulds and make some plastic arches to go over them instead. Now the arches can be covered with sugar paste to match the rest of the cake.

This item wasn't actually designed or drawn by me, I did help out though. Eli was tasked with designing a Roman shield based on his trip to the Lunt Roman Fort . He chose to make a horseman shield which is rounded to protect the horses legs. He drew the whole thing in inkscape, picked the colours and we took it to the laser. The wings were actually drawn 7 years ago  so it was nice just to be able to drag the files out of my archives and use them again. The shield boss was made from vacuum formed plastic.

A quick laser cut from way back in May, this cake topper was to celebrate Daniels Confirmation (obviously). The spikes are a little bit fragile and spiky but it only has to go into the cake once right.

Way back in February, Dawn  had the idea of making a cake based lorry in the same style as the Cake cars we're been doing. It was a great idea but I knew to shift all of the additional weight of a trailer we were going to need four driving wheels and motors. The majority of the weight would be spread over the rear of the trailer so those wheels and axles were put in place with bearings to reduce the rolling resistance. The pivot point was again made with a bearing to ease turning friction. Other minor changes included a reversing beeper and a second set of brake lights on the trailer itself (with curly cable between cab and trailer). The whole thing worked well for this quick demonstration. The problems came when I loaded the trailer down with any weight. I ran my tests using 10kg of weight which the cab was able to pull but the steering was totally ineffective. All the weight was pushed into the drive wheels making the steering light, the sheer power of the four moto...

My Kickstarter puzzles  all need to be dyed and oiled before I can put the final assembly together. Obviously they can't be stacked up while they're drying so making a drying rack to store all the sheets without touching each other seemed to be a sensible idea. The whole thing was coated with some spray lacquer to stop the burnt edges of the rack marking the sheets. The whole thing works just as intended. Another tool for the job was made without going anywhere near the laser and it's as simple as a stack of wood. A dozen planks of ply were cut to each hold a single puzzle and it's pieces. The front panel of the puzzle gets glued to the back panel and the whole thing is put on the bottom of the stack. The weight of the boards, stiffness of 12mm ply plus some extra weights from my screw boxes hold all the puzzles perfectly flat while the glue dries. When the puzzle comes out of the top of the stack it's ready for it's paper coating and it can then go ...