What's in the Workshop | Equipment Tour — Cobblestone Creative, Edinburgh
We get asked about the workshop more than almost anything else. People see the products — the trays, the stools, the engravings — and want to know what made them. So here's the full tour. Every machine in the building, what it does, and why it's here.
The 100W fibre MOPA laser
This is the centrepiece. A 100-watt fibre laser with MOPA technology, which means we can adjust the pulse duration — not just the power. That matters because different pulse lengths produce different effects on the same material. Short pulses give you colour marking on stainless steel. Long pulses give you deep engraving on brass. We use this machine across almost everything we make, from Ash & Grain brass inserts to industrial prototyping work for other businesses.
It's fast, it's precise, and the detail it can hold is genuinely hard to believe until you see it in person. We're talking fractions of a millimetre.
The 60W CO2 laser
This one cuts and engraves organic materials — wood, plywood, acrylic, leather, fabric, paper. Where the fibre laser works on metals, CO2 works on everything else. It's what we use for prototyping Tog & Twig designs before they go to the CNC, and it handles all our acrylic and leather work. The smell when it cuts through birch plywood is something else — like a very clean bonfire.
The CNC router (small-scale)
Computer-controlled routing for wood, plywood, MDF, and soft metals. This is what cuts the Tog & Twig animal silhouettes and profiles furniture components. It works in 2D and 2.5D, meaning it can cut shapes out of sheet material but also carve contoured surfaces — chamfers, pockets, relief patterns. It's slower than a laser but handles much thicker material and leaves a machined edge rather than a burned one.
We've also got a 2.4m by 1.2m larger-format CNC arriving soon, which will let us process full sheets of plywood in a single pass. That changes the game for production runs.
The 3D printers
We run two Bambu machines — an H2D and an A1. Both are filament printers (FDM), not resin. We chose filament because our use case is almost entirely functional: prototype parts, jigs, fixtures, test-fit components. We can go from a CAD model to a physical part in a few hours, test it, adjust, and print again. That speed is what makes prototyping work at a small scale — you don't wait days for parts, you iterate in an afternoon.
The woodworking workshop
Behind all the machines, there's a fully equipped woodworking setup. Table saw, bandsaw, planer-thicknesser, router table, orbital sanders, hand tools. This is where raw timber gets dimensioned, edges get cleaned up, surfaces get finished. The machines do the precision work, but the woodworking bench is where everything gets assembled and made real.
A lot of people assume a workshop like ours is all digital fabrication. It isn't. Every piece of mahogany we use for Ash & Grain still gets hand-sanded, hand-oiled, and hand-inspected before it goes anywhere. The machines are precise, but your hands are what tell you whether a surface is actually finished.
Why this combination?
Most small workshops specialise. Laser shop, or woodworking shop, or CNC shop. We deliberately set up to cover the full range because we wanted to be able to take a product from concept to finished object without outsourcing anything. If it involves wood, metal, acrylic, or plastic — and it fits through our door — we can make it.
That's the real answer to "what's in the workshop." It's everything you need to make almost anything, run by two people who know how to use all of it.