Cyberpunk city mdf buildings

When you glue five pieces of flat mdf into a box shape, it doesn’t matter how much you try to convince yourself it’s a generic building shape, it still just looks like a wooden box.

I didn’t really fancy spending hours and hours on each building, lining with those ridiculously small foam bricks, to make it look less like an mdf-wooden-box. So came up with (what seemed like, at the time) a brilliant idea.

Many, many years ago – when they very first came to the UK educational market – Mrs Blinky (a local authority SENCO at the time) bought a Graphtec Craft Robo. It’s basically a little desktop vinyl cutter. Originally for cutting paper and vinyl, later versions were “beefed up” to cut thin card and targetted at the crafter’s market.

Ours is a very early version and struggles to cut anything even as “thick” as photo paper. But it does brilliantly at cutting out shapes from self-adhesive sticker paper.

After a lot of wrangling with Windows 10 (we were running Windows XP back when we first got the CraftRobo) I eventually got it running as a fake usb-printer. Mrs Blinky dredged the darkest recesses of her memory to puzzle out how it worked, and made some rather spanky stickers for my sci-fi buildings.

She used the same .dxf files as I’d sent to the laser cutter to create the cutting outline for the stickers. Amazingly it worked first time (if you’ve ever worked with CNC machines and know all about backlash, belts slackening and scaling issues between software, you’ll understand what a relief this was!)

The end result was so good, and the cuts so close that – in the real world at least, not through the lens of a 12MP digital camera – it’s not easy to see where the join is…

We might just have a quick and easy way to make our wooden boxes look like sci-fi buildings after all…..