More projects made with Big Blue Saw...

My son, Orion, loves to ride his tricycle. Occasionally he rides with us on family walks around the neighborhood. He's pretty low to the ground when he's on pedaling on his own, though, and naturally I'm nervous that some careless driver won't see him until it's too late.

So I came up with the idea of putting a flag on his tricycle to make it not only safer, but more festive as well.

Read more: The tricycle project: a colorful custom flag made with Big Blue Saw

I made these custom dog tags for some friends' dogs. The material is red and white engravable acrylic.

Sven and Pygar are, of course, Australian Shepherds.

Miles, my friends' son, turned 1 year old this past month. I created this sign for him as a birthday present. The sign was designed in Inkscape then cut and engraved on the laser from poplar wood.

If you wanted to create one sign using Big Blue Saw, it would cost about $22.50, with the price coming down to less than $11 each in quantity.

The original SVG design.

The DXF version, suitable for use with Big Blue Saw's online quoting system.

From the workshop of Andrew Lindsey comes this remarkable walking robot.

My favorite features are

• The glowing indicator light made from a uranium-glass marble flanked by six high-power UV LEDs.
• The fact that it can flip itself over and run upside-down just as easily as right side up.

Most of the external metalwork was done by Mr. Lindsey, but he used Big Blue Saw to make the internal frame. He writes

The primary chassis of the robot is made from a single piece of waterjet-cut steel plate from Big Blue Saw. I was originally reluctant to order parts made for the robot as I wanted as much of it as possible to be hand-made, but having parts custom-cut turned out to be a very good idea. I was able to get some very complex and organic pieces of metal made with great precision, which eliminated issues with servo alignment in previous versions.

Read more about it at his blog or see photos in the Flickr photoset.

I recently started making samples of the materials that Big Blue Saw offers. Since I knew that I would be showing these to customers, and possibly giving them away, I made the samples in the form of business cards (some of you have received these with your orders).

Read more: An acrylic business card holder

From the blog of Canadian robot builder Roko comes this beautiful work in progress, a quadruped robot made using parts from Big Blue Saw.

Roko writes in one post "I'm still happy overall with the water-jet cutting, and would recommend it to anyone trying to make more complicated shapes or numerous parts. I wouldn’t have been able to make all of the more complicated/curvy cuts by hand as precisely and quick as the water-jet service does."