The Nazca Cat project is a sort of “neon” sign made in the shape of the Nazca Cat found on a hillside in Peru in October 2020. I liked the design of the cat, and found a nice image from a news story on CBC. Some quick digitizing in Vectric Aspire, a bit of CNC Routing, and some LED “neon” lighting, and the project was complete! It looks great in the window of our studio!

Check out the video:

Here’s the lights I used from eBay: LED Strip Neon Lights 2835 SMD 120LED/M Flexible Silicone Tube Waterproof 12V 5M
(I’d check around on ebay for the best deal on these. And also look for a 12V power supply. 3Amps or more)

We recently took delivery of an Aciera F5 mill. This is a very high quality Swill mill from the 80’s. It’s a joy to use!

At first we were keeping our tooling in a drawer – but the tools quickly overflowed the drawer – plus they were banging around and could get damaged. Time for action!

It was just a few minutes work to draw up a tool holder in Vectric VCarve Pro, then export it to SheetCAM in order to create a tool path for our Langmuir Systems plasma cutter. We literally had the tool holder done inside 10 minutes. I love this sort of project – one that really shows how quick the whole toolchain is, from software to plasma cutter to finished result in just a few minutes. And, now we have plenty of tool storage! (Which is getting full…)

A friend of Rich’s, David Francis is a wine dealer in Montreal Quebec at dfwine.ca. Dave needed a rack for displaying and selling wine in corner stores and grocery stores throughout Quebec. He came to me with an idea for a wine display that looked like a stack of wine cases. It looked like a cool project, so we decided to help Dave with a prototype display.

The display easily assembles and disassembles for transport, and is solid and good looking in any store. It also has provision for a display card at the top, and also doesn’t take up too much valuable store real estate. 

We made a pretty cool video about this. Please check it out here!

Here’s some photos as well.