Spring Cleaning

At this time of year, FifeX always has a lot of maintenance jobs to help bring things up to scratch for the spring and summer seasons. Today, Ken and Dom were in Fort George installing a new Corian table top for the jigsaw interactive and making a few touch-ups to the paintwork in the exhibition. We are also looking forward to putting in some more fireplaces as part of the developments in the barracks - watch this space!

Straightening the Curve

Another new venue to add to our list - FifeX has just returned from the Arbroath Abbey Visitor Centre. Part of their display features some huge sweeping curves and some AV monitors which are all flat - a perfect job for a Friday!

FifeX sorted out the gaps and got it tidied up ready for their busy summer season.

Back to MUSA

MUSA was the site of one of FifeX's early museum installs and over the last few weeks we have been doing a few updates to the exhibits and their housing. Most of the working parts have held up really well in what is almost ten years but a few cosmetic improvements have been made! We have started using Corian more and more for surfaces that will be getting abuse and the photo on the right shows our new 'glasses holders' designed and produced by Dom in 'Deep Nocturne' - hopefully these will stand up well and can be sanded to look like new in a few years!

Peli Case Design

Over the years, it is surprising just how many Peli cases we have worked on! Peli cases are used by lots of companies for displays and marketing and so we've got used to making bespoke inserts for them. Over the start of this year, we worked with Dukosi on a set of display boxes for their products. We designed and fitted the inserts and worked with them to get it all into the small box.

If you need a portable display, and you need it to be rugged, there's probably not a better place to go than a Peli and you know where to come to have it fitted!

Modelling the Abbey

FifeX has been working on a major modelling and 3D printing job for Historic Scotland at Dunfermline Abbey.

An amazing model (right) forms part of their display but it has come in for some abuse over the last few years - as it was built as a one-off, it has been hard and expensive to replicate parts.

Each component can be positioned on the main model to show the development of the Abbey over the years - with some buildings sitting on top of others!

FifeX took on the job of remodelling all the buildings into 3D so that they could be printed.

The render on the right shows the 3D data for one of these buildings. The process of printing these is under way - we'll get some photos on here when they're ready!

GSC - SEPA

FifeX completed a large install at GSC funded by OPAL and SEPA. The exhibition is on floor two next to the lift and is formed of a large wall section with tables and two other tables near the window.

The top photo shows part one of the exhibition which includes a bespoke abacus software game, two huge touch sensor areas and a fairly advanced electronic shape sorted with some interesting sounds.

Picture two shows a prototype of our Corian 'puck' holder. The small pucks hold resin encapsulations of various lichen samples and users can view them under UV light. The puck holders are made from two thicknesses of corian and then milled out to form the discs. The mount for them is also milled in-house on our X-carve.

The third photo shows the two OPAL desks with the samples out for viewing.

The tables are all made in double-thickness ply with the cut-outs for the translucent acrylic which look fantastic if you see them when it's not night-time!

Space Station - Columbus

The end of 2016 and the start of 2017 were dominated by a hugely exciting project to recreate the Columbus module of the International Space Station inside Aberdeen Science Centre!

The giant module is just over 6m long and is completely circular - it is covered in foamex and has a few authentic features including space food! The Science Centre are going to be filling the module with challenges and experiments over the next few months so be sure to get along and see what they're doing.

In this photo the team are shown with a cardboard cut-out of Tim - but maybe he'll make it along at some point - fingers crossed!