What workshop do you want to teach next holiday season?

The end of year holiday season is ripe for workshops that produce a gift, or a skill that can help produce one.

Now that we are relatively retrospective of 2020 eoy holidays, what do you want to teach next year?

As a call out, I know there were some great cutting boards made, some laser engraving, and maybe even some cool metalwork

2 Likes

I want to do chocolate making, possibly doing holographic chocolate moulds with laser cut customization, and I want to do plasma cut christmas lanterns. Also the plasma cut jack-o-lanterns for halloween.

5 Likes

Omg wrt chocolate I’d be happy to bring my immersion circulator and show this great tempering technique that just makes it so much easier than the traditional technique!!!

chocolate and it’s physical properties are just the coolest!!!

5 Likes

That’s what I use too! OMG! I laser cut a prototype bain-marie bath for this year’s batch, but I think I’m going to weld myself up a stainless version out of the leftovers from the monolith for next year’s.

Beta 5 crystalization is so cool.

@sampath I struggled a bit with temperatures at the start of the process, and I’d be curious to know more about the method you use.

2 Likes

I followed Alex’s technique! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--KcoWb8ZD4

He got himself thermoforming setup to make custom moulds (jealous), But perhaps we can replicate the effect by using something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWWq2hH7imA

2 Likes

image

The first step is just by heating chocolate in a bag to ~50c, cooled down to ~27c by adding ice cubes to the water bath, and then the bath can be taken up to 32c which gets us to working temp.

2 Likes

The vaccum former is on the todo list for sure. the todo list is long but we will get there eventually.

2 Likes

Btw I just grabbed the aluminum from the attic and saw the box of chocolates you left for me. I didn’t know you made them, they look really cool!
Thanks!!!

1 Like

@metalJanet’s chocs are so good!!!

1 Like

I don’t so much want to teach a structured workshop but would love to help people do little greenhouse builds using a dht-22 sensor following my setup guide. This is a great intro to esp programming/sensor use and I think could be a good introduction to using the arduino IDE for people who are good at self-starting.

I use a pre-built greenhouse but there are a few very inexpensive 3D printed connectors out there for building small indoor greenhouses from acrylic sheets that could be lasercut at VHS.

Add @mike’s Illuminate This! board to the project and you’d have a handy little grow station for minimal dollars.

3 Likes

I do want to run this in 2021:

I have tried doing it virtual a few times but I think you need to see the various LED displays in person…
Can’t wait till we can assemble in small groups safely again…

4 Likes