Time Bandits the TV Series

So Apple TV are going to do a Time Bandits TV Show...

This could suck in so many ways but I am hopeful that they don't stuff it up.

Gillian Anderson - Laser Engraved Coasters

My friend and Dragons Keep clubmate Kat is a Gilliam Anderson superfan.  This makes it incredibly easy to make super special custom gifts for her birthday.

Laser Engraved Gillian Anderson Coasters

On a recent Aliexpress buying spree I bought a pack of 72 plywood blanks for the princely sum of £7.20 so that's 10p each.  Measuring 73mm square and 2.3mm thick with rounded corners, they are a perfect size for a custom coaster project.  I decided to break the project up into a border and an image so I could take advantage of the speed of an .svg file for the outlines and the variable laser power that comes with a rasterized image.

The Border

This is my first really successful project designing something in Inkscape specifically for the laser engraver and LaserGRBL.  The border file was engraved at 20% power and 200mm/minute and each coaster took a little over 3 minutes to engrave.

The Pictures

I assembled a series of 6 images from the internet covering some of Gillian's most famous roles and prepared these in GIMP ensuring that they were scaled to exactly 63mm square.  Trial and error ensured that when I imported these images into LaserGRBL I had the necessary 6mm x/y offset to ensure that they were centered inside the engraved square.

These images were then imported as 1 bit Dithered B/W at 15 lines per mm and the engrave settings were 20% power at 500 mm/minute.  This meant each coaster took between 30 and 100 minutes depending on the amount of black space in the image.   

I could probably have engraved these much faster but I'm still learning how to engrave and I don't mind it taking a little longer rather than having to run multiple passes. 

Gillian Anderson truly is a chameleon of an actress.

Bonus Cats

I also added a bonus portrait of each of Kat's two Cats, Bonnie and Clyde for good measure.  

My First Laser Cut Box and bases

Whilst it may seem to outsiders like I am just obsessed with laser cutting at the moment, I'm not.  There are other projects in the works but these are longer term and I am having a bit of a redesign of my makerspace in order to make the machines I have work seeamlessly together.

Chief of these was working out how to make my laser cutter actually cut and so I printed off a couple of Laser Focus Height Gauges from Thingiverse so that I could really fine tune my laser focus using the Ramp Method.

My First Laser Cut Box

I designed this on the free to use MakerCase website and it was a doddle.  Just plumb in the dimensions of your box, the thickness of the material and then move the sliders to determine the width and number of your finger joints.  Once you are happy the software will export an SVG file which you can edit further in inkscape or just drop into your cutter software of choice.

The Maker Case software has lots of options including those cool curved corner boxes

Miniature Bases

Whilst I was at it I drew up some simple miniature bases in inkscape and in 20 minutes I had a sizeable stack of collection ready to use for my minis.  This is a great use for hardboard or MDF offcuts and I can see that I will be making a lot of custom wooden pases in the future for my many modelling projects.

Godzilla Minus One - Is this the Greatest Godzilla Movie Ever?

Finally got round to seeing this and OMG I loved it!

I remember seeing a short CGI clip, many moons ago, of Godzilla rampaging through a 1940s Tokyo complete with a flying tram and I was blown away. 

Godzilla Minus One is so much more.

Boardgame Badge Burn Ballsup

My friend Stephen (Table Tok Games) is making the pilgrimage to UK Games Expo in Birmingham this year and will be running demos of some of the upcoming releases from Hachette Boardgames. 

He asked me if I could make some badges for the event. I thought that this would be a great way to learn how to use my new Laser Cutter Engraver.

Stephen created a design in two parts, an etch file with his meeple logo and a cut file with a series of 30mm circles which would be the badge.  Registration marks in two opposite corners made sure that Illustrator would not trim the images to just the internal drawing.

LaserGRBL

I am currently using LaserGRBL which has support for SVG from inkscape but this is an experimental feature so the files were exported as PNG.

The Cut File 

The cut file was uploaded into LaserGRBL and I used the centreline option to vectorize a cut path.  This was slightly problematic in that the on the very top and bottom row of circles the line hit the edge of the page and vectorizing broke the cut path.  

Pardon the pun, but there is definitely a learning curve when creating files for the laser cutter.  The next attempt will have some whitespace between the design and the registration marks.

I imported this at 120mm/min and a laser power of 95%

The Etch file

Importing the etch file I opted to go for the Line to Line Tracing option at a speed of 500mm/min and a laser power of 95%

The Material

I had some scrap MDF sheet left over from some DIY project.  This measured 2.8mm thick and I mounted it on my workspace with Duck Double Sided Tape (Boy this stuff is sticky) 

Laser Engraving

I was reasonably pleased with the engraving which took just over 20 minutes with one pass.  I initially tried 1000mm/min but the laser threw an error about two thirds of the way through and it would not recommence.  I think that it must have run into a buffer problem or the speed was too high.  I have not done any testing on speeds as yet so this may be part of my learning curve. 

The only downside with the Line to Line Trace option is that it prints like a conventional printer and you get jaggy curves (there's no anti-aliasing as far as I can tell)

Laser Cutting

This is where I fall down, hard.  With any new technology or tool you just have to learn what works and what doesn't.  I have no idea if I am using the software correctly, if my laser is focused correctly, how many passes I should be making, should I be using Air Assist, if my material is at fault or even if I am expecting too much.  There are so many variables.

After 4 passes and 160 minutes of cutting I gave up in frustration.

Resin 3D Printer to the Rescue 

This job still needed to be completed as delivery is scheduled for the following day.  45 minutes later these bad boys came off the Photon Mono 4K.