Dallas Makerspace Show & Tell - July 2018

Weeding vinyl may be more time consuming than using the laser, depending on how complicated your pattern is. It’s also a bit wasteful if you’re doing it over and over again since the vinyl is thrown away. However, if you want to etch a flat pane of glass, I believe you can use Armour Etch with a reusable plastic stencil. (I haven’t tried this, but saw people doing it online.) You could laser cut the stencil from acrylic. Many options indeed.

2 Likes

Made a couple dye sub mugs last night. First attempt at mugs - turned out pretty good.

18 Likes


This is my CNC test I did with Chris. The love is done on the thunder laser

13 Likes

Powder coating class. Big thank you to @hon1nbo.

19 Likes

oh oh, now you’ve done it. You’ve given me an idea.
plus now I’d take it over to the lasers to engrave something really cool on it.

The Summit powders are laser safe (Polyester), but please note the Harbour Freight powders are not. We are working on documentation.

Cheers,
-Jim

2 Likes

good to know.
(does this make it 20 chars?)

awesome dude really cool!

great idea, didn’t even occur to me!

Here’s a piece of RPG terrain I made for an online terrain making competition (yes, there is such a thing). The theme was a temple entrance. I call it “Temple of the Serpent Queen”

28 Likes

This is amazing! …

Mostly, it’s blue and pink extruded polystyrene foam cut on a homemade Hotwire foam cutter, plastic wedding cake pillars, and DollarTree flotsam for texture. The “snow” is a 1:1:1 mix of white craft paint, cheap white glue (also from DollarTree) and baking soda).

Here’s a before-paint shot:

11 Likes

Mike that is so great. Your painting technique is awesome. It’s hard to believe that is painted foam. I thought it was resin cast.

4 Likes

Now I’m curious… Got any pics of your hotwire cutter?

EDIT: Also, great work on those! Reminds me of the Medusa scene from Clash of the Titans (1981)

1 Like

The foam was textured by rolling a rough stone over the surface to dent it up a bit (a ball of heavy aluminum foil would also work). I filled gaps with lightweight wall spackling (from DollarTree).

The painting is actually pretty simple, too. I used black Gesso as a base coat (this was an experiment, I usually use black craft paint but the gesso does seem to cover, grip, and seal better in one coat). FWIW, spray paint propellant eats foam, so that generally isn’t an option.

Then I used a sponge to heavily blot on “barnwood” (a grey brown), and then a “stone grey” on top. Putting the brown as an undertone varies the color a bit more and makes the stone a little warmer in tone. I hit the edges with a brush with stone grey to highlight the edges.

5 Likes


Water fall at 1/4 s and 1/400 s for Makers of Photos group meetup.This month’s assignment was a study in length of exposure. Taken at Dallas Arboretum.

16 Likes

Does the flame flicker?

Yep. DollarTree LED tea light with tiny sticks stuck on with superglue.

3 Likes

I don’t have a pic and I am currently out of town. I’ll start a new thread with construction details.

3 Likes

We had another wand making class last night.

13 Likes