monkeysarefun

Hi somon, I agree fully with what you are saying - and it is wise counsel! Just reminiscing here on a Sunday evening, but I remember back in the early '70's when backyard incinerators were part of everyones (at least here in Australia) childhood. Meant for burning leaves and so on but back in that innocent time well before hazardous information websites so much other stuff got thrown in - plastics, aerosol cans, paint tins.... and we kids would sit around it , especially when weird plastics and aerosols got thrown in because the flames would be amazing colours Also, the guy flying the crop duster plane dusting the crops across the road from our school would apparently find it hilarious if we were out playing sport when his crop dusting run was scheduled because he'd open the taps right on top of us, and we'd wonder, as we were standing around on the softball field, where the funny tasting rain was coming from. If I now come down with a weird tumour, I won't have any idea who to sue!

And 3mm ply! I appreciate the hazard information, for those reasons I've always used the emblaser outside, preferably when the wind is a nor-wester to disperse anything toxic towards the neighbour I don't like!

Hi Dave, I've not had any luck with plasticard/styrene. I had a quick go and all I ended up with, no matter what combination of power/speed and so on that I tried was just a rough-cut smoky mess, covered in black soot. I was worried what effect it would have on the lens cleanliness so abandoned the attempts. As I said early on in the thread I don't use plastic in my 'normal' modelling so it was no great disappointment. One material that I have found to be great - and which I willl use for things like window frames, iron lacework and so on - is a kind of 'metalized; or 'plasticised' card, available from art suppliers or Ebay, A local (to me!) example is here. It seems a great compromise because it has the ease of cutting that cardboard has, but it also lets you snap out bits that aren't quite cut through - like plastic - and doesn't leave little tufts or tear like normal card. PVA/spray glue glues it fine and it comes in a variety of thicknesses, not sure the imperial equivalent but basically from photocopy paper thickness to thin card of 0.4mm. The darker colours seem to laser better in that they can be done at a lesser speed and power, but the light colours are fine too. I haven't tried painting it yet but imagine should hold paint ok after spraying with primer - say Tamiya or similar. Gaz, those coaches are brilliant!

Allan, I've always considered your windmill as your "Yellow Submarine", compared to all the other "Sergeant Peppers" that you have created. I'll always remember eagerly waiting for articles from you all those years ago, , and am still enjoying your input here on this site today, and I know that many others will join in thanking you for the enjoyment you have and are still giving to us all. ..( Do I get a free building now!)

Dry stone walls made from cat litter (or in my case aquaruim pebbles), I also remember a church made from budgie grit? I wonder if pet shop proprietors noticed strange surges in demand for certain products at various times and if so, if they linked it to the publishing of your articles in the Railway Modeller just prior? Of course, canny ones would have and thus would have been able to gain a commercial advantage over their opposition - "Better triple the Hedgehog order this month dear, Allan Downes has just published a new way of making fence posts". It is a strange quirk of memory (but more likely a tribute to your writing) that although the 70's were my school years, I now remember very little of what I was taught back then. Quadratic equations -completely forgotten; Huygens principle - no idea any more... But, I can still remember the titles of most of your articles from the same years, - and what they were about. 'All of a Twist" - an article about curved station platforms; "Whats his names yard" - All about building one of those mysterious forgotten junk yards that are dotted in back streets. "Budgie grit string and so a church" - ok, I forget what that one was about. How crestfallen was I when 'Mastermind' was canned and my dream of cleaning up with my special subject "articles by Allan Downes" came to naught. In fact, my crest has still not recovered from that fall. Actually, such is the effect that your articles have on my memory that it often spread to any other articles that happened to share a page with yours. I remember your windmill article shared the page with one asking "Whats wrong With That Cow?" and still remember that it was to do with bovine regional differences - something to do with their antlers or whatever their pointy bits are called. The only other thing that comes back to me from the past in a similar way are advertising jingles. I'd always thought that if Kirchoff's Law of Electric Circuits had had a snappy jingle I'd have done a lot better at exams, but now I'm thinking that an even better result would have come about by reading an article written by you on say Newtons Three Laws Of Motion, preferably with a sharp punning title, set to a toe-tapping jingle. Result - Total Recall!

Wow, thanks Allan - that's very humbling considering it was you writing in the Railway Modeller back in the '70's that sparked my enthusiasm for modelling buildings. Dad got it on subscription and when ever it arrived in its buff envelope in our leterbox (3 months late - the Christmas issues with the model layouts covered in festive snow we would get in late March) I'd straight away search through for an Allan Downes article. If it wasn't there it would be a long wait for the following months delivery. Some of my attempts to use your ideas have become family stories, two that pop up are 'borrowing' the pebbles in my dads aquarium to mix with PVA and pack into wooden moulds to make some peanut brittle style dry stone walls, and 'borrowing' the expensive wool that mum had bought intending to knit a fancy jumper to use as thatch on a cottage. So if in any way I've been able to return some of the entertainment you gave me back then then I am really happy. Thanks again!

G'day Allan, The link is to a page of a website by an awesome Spanish bloke who makes up plans intended for cutting out with a fretsaw/srcollsaw. The link itself is to his plans that you can buy if you want to saw out 12000 or something little parts from thin wood in order to build a model of Milan cathedral. . The first three photos in the link are of a model by an Australian - Ken Field - that I saw way down here at the Sydney Working With Wood show a couple of years ago, He cut it all out from timber, with a fret saw, amazing stuff. If you scroll down in landlords link you will see similar models by other crazy people using a variety of materials - acryllic, timber and possibly Colron wood dye, whatever that is. I have since bought the plans - here they are arranged dramaticaly on my floor - all 71 pages of them! I bought them originally to cut out over my entire life a bit at a time with a fretsaw, but have since bought a laser cutter so am hopeful of scanning them into the laser cutter programme and getting it to do the work while I lounge about drinking beer. Regards, Chris J

I have found some madness too..... http://www.finescrollsaw.com/milan-cathedral.htm Actually it has extra madness, considering its intended to be cutout with a scrollsaw rather than a laser!

9am - do tax return. 9.30 - Realise that I get back enough to buy 3.5 Emblaser 2's. 9.30.05 - 9.45 - Yay! (I only ordered one though.)

My insurance claim came through this week, now the dilemma - new carpet or Emblaser 2..? If only the bare concrete floor wasn't so cold, though with the payout I COULD get an emblaser 2 and thicker socks!

Got this link on my pinterest page today. Don't know too much about it. http://mr-beam.org/

It would be easier to laser tattoos off I reckon, which is how this Emblaser thing all started, way back when in post #1!

Before my life descends completely into fodder for a bad country and western song I'd like to thank everyone here for your support and wishes. I now have a new laptop (Windows 10 - kill me now!) and am going through the painful process of re-installing everything - Inkscape,Cut 2D laser etc etc. On the positive side, I had all my data files backing up nightly from the laptop to a seperate hard-drive in the front (the higher ground bit!) of the house so now its just a case of restoring it all. If I'd lost all the Inkscape and .pdf files for the laser stuff, that would have been really bad, so if I can offer anything from this - please consider how hard it would be for you to recover from some kind of failure or natural disaster - backing stuff up is kind of nerdy and boring but it can be the difference between 2 or 3 hours of annoyance getting it all back, and the loss of months worth of work, and you can easily find free backup software online ( Catch is, they make it easy to backup up, but a pain in the a*se to restore from unless you pay for the premium version!..... How do I know that?) Additionally, where do you have the license keys for your software? Emailed copies I have in a yahoo mail folder so thats easy to retrieve, the others I copied to an encrypted app on my phone, annoying to type in 30 or so characters, but I have them all there ready once I"ve re-installed the software. Please, take a few minutes to consider the risks to your data should something bad happen, and have a backup regime happening! Something to cheer me up.. I finished the jewellery box - but thought it would be awesome to embed tiny rare earth magnets into the box and the lid to keep it shut. Unfortunately I araldited the one on the right hand side of the box the wrong way around (how was I meant to know which way is the right way!) and so when I put the lid on, the right hand side levitates itself up about 3mm due to the power of stupid magnets. Currently trying to figure out how to fix that! WHAT MORE CAN GO WRONG!!!!?!?!?!

Hi Sam, Sorry for the delay getting back to you, but I've sure had a crappy month - floods, then on the weekend I killed my laptop with a full cup of coffee and this morning my dog (who made a small cameo appearance in post #1 of this thread) passed away, but enough about my woes, in regards to your question I'm happy for you to use any pictures that you think Facebook worthy. Cheers, Chris.

Hi Nick, Thanks for the kind wishes. I do have some ply I can send you, it arrived as 1,5mm, now its about 4mm , kind of spongy and speckly green! Let me know i f you want it and we can work something out. Cheers, Chris.

Michael, Thanks so much for the kind thoughts.!

Hi again Emblaserers! I'm back from the big ef en flood. 2 weeks of tearing up carpets and dealing with insurance companies and working out how to convince them that a pile of papier mache was once expensive laser friendly taskboard stock that cost $120 to ship from the USA... All my cardboard and ply got soaked and now has mould all over it, but - and I know this has nothing to do with model railways - I've found enough dry veneer bits to have a play with marquetry using the emblaser, to make a lid for a jewelry box ... mainly so I can get permission from the other half to get an emblaser2! Now back to working out insurance forms...! Cheers, Chris

Hi Ian, In post #391 (on page 16) of this thread I posted a .pdf file and a .crv file of a small sample of brickwork. Perhaps it could be useful to test and/or compare with yours to see if you can see where the problem lies?. Personally I did initially try .ps and .eps formats but had issues with it joining separate vectors (eg 2 windows) together with a cutline and other strange behaviour, so from there I've just stuck with .pdf format as import into Cut2D. Which has its own other issues regarding the registration of different layers, but I've got a workaround for that at least. Additionally if .eps is an allowed file type, you could post your file up to the forum here and we can all have a play!

Hi Domenic, welcome to the forum, its great to have you here! Ian - as per what Nick and Giles wrote. I often forget to select any vectors before hitting the 'calculate' button and get a message similar to yours. They will go pink when selected. Jason - great bricks! I had a bit of a disaster from the rains of last weekend which flooded out my hobby room. Luckily the Emblaser was upstairs where I'd been using it in the warm, so was unharmed. Annoying thing is all the card and taskboard and ply that I've been acquiring over the last few months were leaning up against the wall and soaked up water and are now just a soggy mess. Though compared to what others in Picton (just the other side of the hill here) lost after having 2 metres of water through the town, I feel petty whinging about it..

Thanks Giles, in between considering if I should move my laser to higher ground I trawled the archives of the darklylabs forum and discovered you need to change a Z to an S in one of the many obscure fields of the picsense configuration screen. That software is definitely CNC nerd centric! That fixes the 'stay in one spot' problem, now I have to figure out how to let it know where 0,0 physically is because when it starts the laser head apparently tries to go a foot or so beyond the physical start point of the emblaser and there is a worrying 5 seconds or so of the screeching sound of slipping belts as it jams up against the chassis.

No worries Ian, The inset picture shows them as they come - you just need to slide switch 1 and 4 up to match the others.

G'day Ian, This is what my PCB looks like - and you can see the dip switches there. The fact mine says Rev -1 and you say yours says Version 2 might iindicate that they have updated things and removed them. Which makes sense since I don't imagine very many 3W lasers are sold, and the 4 Watt doesn't need its power input limited so they are no longer necessary, I reckon! On a different note while I'm here, has any body tried out the picsense and picsender photo engraving software from the links on the darklylabs site? I downloaded it on Friday but so far its rather frustrating and all I've managed so far is for the laser to sit in one spot and burn a little hole, until I cancel the programme at which point the software loses connectivity with the laser and only a laptop reboot gets it back. If anyone HAS managed to get it going I'd love some tips! I'll carry on again today, the weather is good for nothing else here this weekend, though if the rain keeps up I might have to get started on that ark. Bright note, my house now has water views.

Welcome aboard sir! On the subject of materials, not apparently being able to get Trotec easily here, I have been buying random things when I see them in shops and trying them out... One material that I'm really impressed with is a kind of metalized paper - and similar in card, that you can get from office supply or arts and craft shops here. The card works out at around .3mm going by my calipers, and the paper at around .17mm. Its impressively cheap, and does also come in 300gsm weight on Ebay. In use it displays more the characteristics of plastic than card, in that bits that aren't quite cut through can be snapped out cleanly, without leaving a little tuft, or tearing like card would. It also doesn't scorch like card. It has a slightly shimmery metalic sheen but can be painted (and glued) without a problem, and it does come in many many colours, though not really a true black (my go-to colour for lasering now!) unfortunately, the one called 'Charcoal' is actually a very dark green. Both this one and the very dark navy blue ones laser really well though and like I said, they can be painted afterwards. I've been using 100% power, 1 pass at 10mm/sec, but I think it could go a little faster. I'm not sure how they compare - in quality and price - to the dedicated laser materials, but if you can find them around the place its worth giving them a go. I also bought a few sheets of 'RC board' from an American website called rustystumps.com. I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems to be a kind of woody/pulpy material a bit similar to MDF. It is only in 2 thicknesses, the thinnest being .4mm equivalent, which still sounds a little thick for what you are after. At $4.55 US for an 8inch by 12inch sheet. Again, I'm not sure how that compares to MDF, Trotec and so on, the killer though is the postage here from the US. If ever I think I've got a little bit too much money I get something posted from the US and that quickly gets rid of it!

So, I made some...

These open the market up for a lasercut 1.05mm spanner....