It’s been very slow on the painting front this month. I’ve been out of hospital and voluntarily stopped my pain management medication. I have to say that was really hard. If I had trouble after a week how do people manage who have been on that stuff for far longer. My head is now a lot clearer which is good.
The Austrian Salute is this saturday and it will be my debut. There isn’t much of a range yet and I really hope that people will like what I’m doing. The pricing worries me slightly as my bits are quite pricey. I’m making stuff that I would want on my gaming table, and it’s quite complex and time consuming to make. For example one small 40mm x 40mm x 40mm crate is working out at a sale price of six Euro! This is me paying myself 10 Euro an hour to do the cutting, material (more of which in a minute) and then multiplying by three, which is what they do in the catering/fine dining industry. This doesn’t factor in travel times and collating the big bag of minute parts you are gifted with at the end of cutting or designing and printing labels and buying bags to put the product in.
Material, here’s the joke. I had been buying 4mm ply at the local hardware store and it had been just under a fiver for a metre square and they cut it for free. It seems that the laser-cut industry seems to work on 3mm MDF. So I found a supplier not too far away and online the price was one seventy a square metre. Result, I thought. When I went to pick it up I was presented a bill three times the amount I expected. They charged by the minute for the cutting, by a trained sloth so it appears. Twenty 500mm x 500mm sheets in fifteen minutes! I can understand if I wanted differing sizes. Set stop position, butt wood to stop, cut and check that the first cut is the right size. Repeat.
So I either have to find another supplier or I work in 4mm ply. Which to be honest I don’t mind as ply is a lot more resilient than MDF.

So here is the laser-cutter hard at work. As you can see I don’t actually get that much out of a sheet because of the layers and complexity

Here I am collating components in the front room.