Silver painted dice bag.

After many, many days of dipping my chain maille dice bag in diluted silver acrylic paint, I'm finally happy with the coverage and look. All of the rings have a fairly even coverage and non are stuck together.

The dice bag is available from my Shapeways shop for $37.08 (USD), the price includes international shipping via UPS, additional taxes may also be payable depending upon the delivery destination.

Twin Rail Mobius - Reloaded

If you've seen my profile avatar, you might be wondering what it is.

I call it Twin Rail Mobius Pendant. The pendant is one of my designs that Shapeways 3d printed in stainless steel.

So why 'Twin Rail' and why 'reloaded'?

There's two rails with a mobius twist that form a circle. Three sets of these rails are stacked up and joined by a half-pipe. Reloaded is because this is an updated model that includes a ring on the back for a necklace.

The pendant is designed to take upto 31 6mm balls.

Here's a side shot.

Here's a video on YouTube showing how the balls move.

And another picture - this is how the pedant is supplied from shapeways.

You can buy one for yourself from my my Shapeways shop, included with the pendant is the rubber necklace with a bayonet clasp. Odering is handled by Shapeways and delivery takes upto 20 working days. The balls are not included, but you can add 6mm ball very easily, they just pop inbetween the rails. The price for the pendant is $43.30 and includes UPS delivery (local taxes may also be added depending upon the delivery destination)

Dice bag progress

Well, progress in painting my 70mm dice bag is going very slowly. I'm averaging about four dips into the paint per day... I've lost count how many times the bag has been dipped, but so far none of the rings have stuck together, and over the last few days, the rings are really starting to show a silvery colour.

The image to the right, shows the progress so far. Clicking on the image will take you to a larger image, in which you will see that the paint is still wet. During the 3-4 hour drying time, I move the bag about to prevent the rings sticking together. The paint I'm using is Daler Rowney System 3 acrylic - Silver (imitation) #702.

There's still loads more dipping to go yet, I want the bag colouring to end up looking like the model Baritone horn below.

I suppose I'd better provide a bit of info about the horn. My daughter plays the baritone horn in a local youth band, a friend's (= S) family member (= R) also played the flugel horn in the same band. S asked me if I could design a pendant of a model flugel horn and order it in in the stainless steel material the Shapeways do. I came up with a design and at the same time designed the baritone horn model.

I ordered in the two horns in Shapeways' white strong and flexible material to see how the designs worked out.

Here's the Flugel Horn 'as delivered' in WSF - the scale is about 1/12th. I used a fair bit of artistic license to keep the model small enough and sticking to the Shapeways design rules for the material.

Here's the Baritone Horn in WSF. Again I used a fair amount of artistic license to keep the model small and stick to the disgn rules. My model is based on the Besson BE757 which my daughter plays.

I got the go-ahead from S to get the flugel horn printed in stainless steel - unfortunately the model was rejected and even after beefing the model out to 2mm wall thickness it was rejected again. There's some discussion about that on the Shapeways forum, oh well... maybe when silver printing comes back I can have the horns made in silver.

Back to dipping the dice bag now, it will probably be at least another 4 or 5 days before the bag is finished.

More 3d printed chain maille!

Firstly I made a half persian 4 in 1 chain using 2mm anodised aluminium wire, coiled and cut with aviation snips. The rings turned out to be about 10mm ID giving an aspect ratio of 5. Getting the weave right was fairly straight forward. Once I got my head around how the chain was formed, I set about trying to recreate it as a 3d model suitable for 3d printing, this took maybe upwards of 20 hours over 8 days adjusting wire size, aspect ratio and the angles of the rings... but finally... it worked!

3D printed Half Persian 4 in 1 chain alongside coloured anodised aluminium.






The spacing between the rings of the 3d print works out at about 0.4mm (1.8mm wire and 9.9mm ID, AR5.5) whilst this may seem small, I scaled the chain down to 55%, 1mm wire and gaps around 0.22mm just to see if the rings would fuse during printing... they didn't :)

The Half Persian 4 in 1 chain maille sampler is available from my Shapeways shop.