B.Light Design

Made a lot of lamps for the holidays.

Been doing a lot of making for the holidays and pretty much no cleaning up. Maybe I should ask for a bigger desk for Christmas.

Doing a little holiday making at the moment and whipped up these CNC’d toy trucks. Very similar in style and technique to some cars I did a while back.

The weird thing, I was basically doing exactly what Hermey the dentist elf was doing in Rudolph.

Milled an aluminum bezel for the vacuum formed heart. The fit is pretty good on the first try.

I got myself an affordable little vacuum former a while back, and I’m finally getting around to playing with it.

I made some CNCd forms out of delrin and oak and experimented with formable materials.

But my favorite tip is using a Dremel cutting wheel in a drill press to trim off the excess material.

MAKE Magazine ran a how-to on some Thanksgiving themed Robot Recipes, Pumpkin Pi Bots. Made from the cans of pumpkin pie ingredients.

Some parts are straight forward and some parts are so overly complicated, I’d recommend skipping them altogether. But it gave me a chance to use my new Othermill and slip roll. Happy Thanksgiving.

Kate Hartman and I were experimenting with CNC milling leather. We used an Othermill on different types of leather with varying results. I think we finally got something usable at the end. More to come.

These tests were inspired by a fantastic project from Adidas.

I don’t think I’ve thought about using a rock tumbler for about 30 years, but I heard recently they were great for deburring CNCd parts. I found an affordable one and I just started experimenting. My first to attempts have been pretty good, one of aluminum one of delrin. The parts feel great, all soft edges. Now I need to work on the polish.

I’ve been working on this belt buckle design off and on for a little while. The goal was to have the whole thing be cut out on the Othermill. But it ended up being a better idea to create all of the Delrin parts on the Othermill and the aluminum parts on the Roland 4 axis mill. I ended up cleaning the front up on the metal lathe (clear back plate is laser cut acrylic).

Next one I’ll powder coat and maybe do a design on the front. I’m also experimenting with using a rock tumbler to finish the CNCd parts. More on this later.

I started co-teaching a toy design class. Our first assignment was to create pull string puppet toys. I started with some cardboard prototypes until I got the scale right, then I turned it into a robot. I pulled the design from the Noun Project (thanks Simon Child).