Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Smashing Pennies at Orlando Maker Faire”.
So first just tell us who are you and what did you bring to maker Fair, absolutely so uh, I’m Nick of Nick and Shelly uh we’re a husband, wife team that basically made our own maker space in our garage uh. We basically moved in together after uh at the start of Co, combined our tools together and said. Well, there’s no going back from here. You can’t unsplit tools that have been combined and we’ve slowly been uh, adding on to what we like to do and uh got into leather working and laser cutting uh CNC work, woodworking, Ceramics, uh. What we brought with us today to maker fair is our wooden puzzles.
So all of our puzzles are made out of 100 % real wood uh. We wrote a software program that R randomly generates the puzzle pattern, so every single puzzle is unique not just because it is real wood uh and the grain pattern is different from puzzle to puzzle, but because every piece is different because it’s randomly generated uh. We also uh for this year’s makeup here in Orlando, made a penny Smasher, where we took a jewelry roller and using a fiber, laser and graved in the negative. That is actually stamping the penny uh and we took a.
We knew that kids were going to want to do this and have a lot of fun, so we spent a decent amount of time, making it as safe as we could uh for everyone. So we’re not going to get any pinched pinched fingers nice, nice, and I mean you really answered a lot of the questions I had before before I got a chance to ask them. So I don’t have a lot more questions, but like um with the penny roller like that seems like kind of an old concept. Why did you decide to do fting roller, my wife and I basically have stopped watching TV and movies, and instead we watch makers on YouTube and we, after that’s how we spend our dinners.
That’S how we do date nights it’s, how we relax on the couch with our animals and we found a maker called Hamilton dilbeck. That was experimenting with this concept of using a fiber laser to engrave onto a jewelry Mill, and we looked at that and went. That’S amazing and we had just gotten accepted into the maker Fair 2023 here in Orlando and decided.
At that moment we were going to try to make one for maker fair. So we uh ordered a bunch of uh jewelry rollers from Amazon and Alibaba played around with a bunch of different concepts and slowly found where it was either going to be too dangerous or too difficult, and using our our maker skills found Solutions around those nice and Uh, what’s been the reception here, it looks like it’s been pretty popular, the the the pennies anyway, the penny spaser has been super popular lots of kids have been seeing it and going. Oh, my gosh. I really want to make those which is surprised us a little bit cuz. We thought the adults were going to be the ones that really wanted to use it cuz.
We all know what a penny Smasher is from museums and zoos and and Aquariums, and things like that, but the kids have been absolutely loving it. We almost wish we’ brought a third person just to completely man. The penny machine we’ve had a queue that goes outside of our booth most of the day nice for people watching this, maybe at home uh. Is there a website where people could learn more about your stuff, see your puzzles and stuff like that. So we have our Instagram, which is @ nickam, and then we have our website, which is the same thing at or not at, is Nick and shelly.com uh, which is just a link tree for now we’re actually working on making out a website um, I’m, interestingly enough, I’M a software engineer and my wife is a building architect, so uh we make in the real world and it’s hilarious that uh the software engineer doesn’t have a website for himself, but we have our Instagram that has most of our projects that we do. We do lots of uh videos and reels showing off the work that we’re making.
We have an Etsy where most of our puzzles are available for purchase perfect. Thank you. Thank you. .