Thing-a-day.com

Today’s thing was a bit of a cheat since I had made the parts some time ago, but I didn’t assemble them until today. A few months ago, I got a one-month membership at Techshop in Menlo Park for the purpose of using their laser cutter as much as possible. I came up with a bunch of designs, haunted the scrap-acrylic bins at Tap Plastics, and had a good time. One of the things I did was cut out a lot of 8-bit computer game icons out of plastic. Something about seeing these beloved two-dimensional characters and icons of my youth extruded into the third dimension really tickles me.

One of the things I made were some cutouts of characters from a favorite Atari 800 game, Bruce Lee. I captured some graphics from the game in an emulator, isolated the characters of Bruce Lee, the Green Yamo, and two poses of the Ninja, and used the Epilog laser cutter to cut out their various parts from sheets of acrylic. These pieces have been sitting in a box since last summer, but today I finally glued them together and glued magnets to them, turning them into the fridge magnets they were always intended to be. The ninjas were in one piece, so it was just a matter of gluing a magnet to them, but Bruce Lee and the Green Yamo were made of many small shapes (some only a single pixel), which all had to be sorted and glued together.

They came out pretty well, though if you look closely, there’s a bit of glue-mess on them. I’ll do better next time. Now to re-create M.U.L.E. in acrylic plastic.

Some pictures:

Last 5 posts by adambwells

• Day 29: Papercraft medieval house, dragon, and crates (and wrapup) - March 1st, 2008
• Day 28: Replacement cards for Avalon Hill's Gunslinger - February 29th, 2008
• Day 27: Papercraft 80s arcade games (5th batch) - February 28th, 2008
• Day 26: Papercraft Old West miniatures (and 1 shrinky dink) - February 27th, 2008
• Day 25: Papercraft 80s arcade games (4th batch) - February 26th, 2008