MSRaynsford

My main goal for the day was to transpose all of the contents of my garage workshop into the Luton van I have hired for the purpose of moving house. The big day is tomorrow but given that it's taken me all day to load this thing myself I'm pleased that I decided to do it on my own and focus on just moving the house tomorrow. The day has been long and tiring but mostly successful, the only thing I couldn't manage to get into the van was the second laser cutter. This may cause some minor issues for me but I'm hoping the real removals people can find some space for it. We move from Countesthorpe to Kettering tomorrow and I've allocated myself just one evening to unpack it all into the new workshop, fun times.  

One of the cool things about the recent discovery of an aperiodic monotile, is that it's not just one tile. In fact it's a whole range of tiles, subtly different to each other. The two main shapes that have been taken from this are the 'Hat' as cut yesterday and the 'Turtle which I've cut today. I guess these two shapes have been adopted because they're easily made up from standard kites. Again I cut these in sheets with the grain in the same direction and used the gaps between the shapes to make kites ( svg here )  

The discovery of a solution to the Einstein Problem  has caused a bit of a stir in the mathematical world this week. It's a shape that tiles the plane, but never repeats and while I don't entirely understand the implications or the mathematical proof of such a thing, I know a good looking tessellation when I see one so I set about making up a few. The first tile is known as the 'Hat' (although I think it looks much more like a T-shirt). The tile is made up from a number of different kite shapes so I also cut a few of those out as well. The full shapes are roughly 80mm across and 60mm wide and I cut them in three different flavours of wood veneered MDF, pine, beech and cherry (left overs from the Loki box ) I redrew my own sheet for cutting to ensure that all of the wood grains on all of the pieces align in the same direction and this is what gave me kites to fill in the gaps ( svg here )

It's the festive season so I made this cute little Christmas tree for another project I was working on. It turned out so nicely I gave it a little revamp and thought I'd offer it up here as well. Hope everyone is well and enjoying the festivities.  It's made from 3mm Poplar ply and assembles with press fit joints. The rings just rest on the branches at an angle of your choosing. ( svg here )  

The Dislocation Puzzle  has a ten digit lock in the bottom of the game, solving the codes of the game gives you the answer to open this lock and it's a fairly standard sort of mechanism (I may release it in some form at some point). Each of the code wheels inside the lock is unique, each lock opens at a different angle so that the wood grain doesn't give away the solution (I'm mean like that). So this means I end up with ten very similar looking wheels produced in quantity during the assembly process. To help me stay organised I designed this little tray to keep all the wheels separated. I've made similar trays before and they're usually quite a basic design, the trays I made for my Lego lack coffee table  are still one of the most requested items on my blog. Over time though the bottom of the trays have warped and come away from the adjoining sections. This is largely due to the sheer volume of Lego but I guess age and children leaning on them have a part to play. ...

There's just about twelve hours left on my latest puzzle campaign and it's been another amazing success. Three hundred and thirty backers have currently supported me to get this puzzle produced and I've spent the majority of the last two weeks pushing the laser hard to cut puzzles and pushing myself to assemble them. I promised to ship one hundred puzzles on the day that Kickstarter pays and a further one hundred before Christmas but I've actually managed to build two hundred puzzles already. I reckon I've got a further two weeks before KS actually pays out so with any luck I'll be able to get another hundred built and possibly all of them can ship at the same time. Either way I'll have finished production by the end of November (baring laser problems) and the whole campaign can be wrapped and shipped before Christmas which is a big win for me. There's still time to get in on it too, until 6pm this evening when the campaign officially ends. https://www.k...

  I've been trying to enjoy my time off after finishing the fulfilment for the Loki project , but time off means thinking about the next project and the new puzzles that need to be designed. While we're still in the process of moving house I can't launch into fulfilment for another big game but I have created this smaller, cheaper puzzle that fits perfectly through your letter boxes. The game is currently taking around 4-5 hours to complete so even though it's small in size it's not small in gameplay. It's also been designed as a prelude to the next big game 'Don't shoot the messenger' so while it's not essential to play this first it does add to that story. If you're interested, the pre launch page is already up and I'm hoping to go live some time over the weekend. I've also managed to squeeze a few puzzles into the prelaunch page so go check it out. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/msraynsford/dislocation-a-mechanical-puzzle-gam...