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Showing posts from 2017

Advent Calender

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I found some time today to make a full version of the new advent calendar. I assembled it with all the doors in order but they can be put in any order you want. I view this as a base for a real calendar, a little flourish across the top or a winter scene and it would make a nice product. You could also change the door knobs easily and size for extra customisation. This version is just large enough for quality street chocolates, obviously I have 22 days worth of chocolate to eat tonight :) ( svg here )

Advent test

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I made an advent calendar 5 years ago and despite requests to start selling them, I could never get them into a sensible time frame or budget. This year the discussion of advent calendars came up again and I decided to take another shot, this is how I would make a calendar now. The handles are made using wooden push pins (they need trimming), the doors are hinged by the wall sections and they rest upon the verticals to stop them being pushed in too far. There is enough friction in the hinge to keep them open during use. Obviously I've missed most of December now but I'll draw up the full 24 door version so I'll be well ahead for next year.

Christmas Hangups

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I have a couple of LED strips that I use as Christmas lights . This year I mounted one above the other and I needed some connectors to space them equally across the length. These little hangups were made from 5mm acrylic and allow the strips to slide in and out and clip into place (by squashing the silicon sleeve slightly)

Carcassonne Redux

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I made a mistake while cutting the last set of Carcassonne tiles , I had a magnet too close to the tiles and it didn't cut cleanly. Unfortunately the files for Carcassonne have all the tiles split into two sets and all the tiles smushed together, there is no easy way to recut a single tile. This means it's time to redo the whole set and correct all the other things that have been niggling me. The original files were drawn in 2013 and over the last 4 years I've learned a lot more about inkscape so can do things better. The new file will use layers to allow me to easily turn parts on and off, and more colours which can be set up as operations in Lasercut. Several people have asked for tile sets without the grass, these tiles are generally used as guest books at weddings, no grass leaves more areas to write on. Roads and buildings never quite touched the edges of the tiles. It was close enough not to worry about but I knew it wasn't 'perfect'. L

Potato Prints and Custom Wrapping

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Craft time for the whole family, we're all at home so decided to make some wrapping papers. We started with simple brown paper and carved some potatoes to make printing stamps. For a second sheet we drew a single black line across a page and then finger painted a string of lights onto it, these should provide enough wrapping for a good handful of presents.

Jurassic World Jeep (and gate update)

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If we were making a Jurassic world cake  and we already make cake cars  we'd be a bit foolish not to make a Jurassic world Jeep. The jeep had a custom version of the car base to lift the vehicle a bit higher up but the mechanics are all essentially the same, meaning the car base can actually be quite versatile. Dawn covered the platform with cake and icing and did all the difficult decorating parts that actually make it look like a car, it's a very impressive job that I believe was completed at stupid o'clock the morning before the event. There's even video of the car driving through the gates (the car determined the size of the gates). I'd like to point out that I wasn't there though because friend don't let friends take vertical video.

Car Production done

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It's been a busy week getting these cars into production and after a late night last night I finally finished a batch of 8 cars ready for workshops this weekend. I delivered them to Nottingham first thing this morning and as far as I know it's all going well which means I get to sit back and work on some other projects this weekend (Like catching up on some blogging). In the meantime here are some pics of the completed cars.

Car Shells 2

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The remote car cakes  have a layer of plastic between the cake and the electronics. This needs to be shaped to fit the wheels and provide enough space for actual cake to go onto the car. The vacuum former is the perfect tool for this. I started by taking a mould of an actual toy car about the right size, this ended up being a one shot deal as the toy car melted on the second pull.  At this point I had a sheet of plastic in roughly the right shape and a strong desire not to mess up a second time so I scrabbled around the garage to see what my options were. I found a bag of plaster of paris and decide that casting the mould was a sensible way forward. The plaster of paris was cast, the kitchen was turned upside down, nearly every available surface turned into useful space full of junk, at least I had a few hours to tidy things up again. It was all a bit impromptu but good fun. The plaster of paris former was cut into separate parts for the cake. The middle sec

Wheely fun times

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The remote control car cake design was refined to a point where we could run workshops on it, allowing other people to make them. This means small production runs of parts, last night I sat and assembled 32 wheels, each one made from 5 layers of material and then I squeezed rubber tyres onto them. It's mindless work but it needs to be done and at least I get to watch TV at the same time.

Airbrush paint for infill

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I cut some more wound point counters tonight, but this time I used air brush paints to fill the lettering. It's thinner than normal acrylic paint, offers great coverage and dries quicker. I definitely recommend it for infill effects.

BB9E cake

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I had the pleasure of attending a Dinkydoodle Designs cake making course today, it was great to go along and learn how to make the cake that goes around the droid heads  I've been making for the last 2 years. Because BB9 has a flat top I had to rebuild the whole mechanism to make it fit into the available space, I took the opportunity to make some needed improvements, such as vacuum formed heads and bearings for the moving parts. I also decided to add an ESP8266 into the mix so that the whole thing could be controlled from my phone. I had a great day and would really recommend it for anyone who is looking for something different to do.

Present for Santa

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Eli drew a picture of a small present he wanted to make for Santa. He measured the size of the bag to find the right scale and he drew the design out on inkscape with a little bit of help. I set up the laser to cut on a small piece of illomba faced poplar ply that he picked from the scrap pile and 45 seconds later we had the item made. 

Jurassic World Gates

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The control box I made the other day was destined to be connected to this set of Jurassic World Gates. The gates are modelled after those in the film, the LED lights flicker like real torches, the gates open and close (and stop at the limits of their travel) and the whole thing can play the Jurassic World theme tune. This framework will head off Dinkydoodle Designs to be covered in cake and icing.

Quick control box

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I've been working on a cake this weekend, bit of a rush and I'll be able to reveal the whole thing before the end of the week. For now I put together a quick electronics box to give it a polished feeling. The most recent version of inkscape comes with a lot more choice of Hershey text so I opted for a rather nice font on the switches to denote the functions.

Santa Keys

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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 )

Car Body Shells

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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.