Avoiding Idle Hands

With the Governor continuing to encourage us to stay home, my idle hands continued gravitating towards the garage. With the kitchen for the Subie done, it was time to start creating future smiles.

As is typically the case for my gadget caches, I started with Baltic birch plywood to build the boxes.

Yes, that was boxes - plural. It's always more challenging to build several different caches at the same time. There's some process advantage, but since I'm too lazy to draw up designs, there's a lot more thinking time to keep the details separate.

I've used baltic birch with a seal coat of epoxy since I started building gadget caches 4 1/2 years ago. I've discovered the limits of that construction tends to be 3 to 4 years in our climate, so 18 months ago I started adding a layer of 4 oz fiberglass cloth on the exterior of the boxes. I figure that will add at least an extra year, even if I don't do any other maintenance.

The glass cloth should be just enough extra strength to eliminate (I hope) the weather checking that starts around year three.

This one is a design that I've had on my list to do for a couple years. The conceptual test had worked well, and I've had the bits and pieces in stock for a long time.

Turns out, the conceptual test was inadaquate. My design tolerances were tight enough that when fully loaded there was too much friction. I thought it might have been a high maintenance cache, so I took a detour and created a totally different design with the container.

This is another partially formed idea that had bounced around in my head for at least a year, but recently another cacher provided some input that allowed this one to see the light of day. It's reprentative of how I sometimes feel these days - a bit unhinged.

If that weren't enough, I got a bit wired on this one. We'll see if it makes people light up.

There's more to this one but you'll have to find it to find out.

All of these are designed to mount on 4" parking lot light poles. They seem to be safer there than hanging in trees out in the forest.

Cachers (including me) talk disparagingly of lamp post caches aka LPCs, but I doubt these will fall into that same category. Now all I have to do is convince the right property owners to host one of these on their lamp posts.

My anticipated road trip for August has cancelled for this year since it involved large international gatherings. I'm hoping things open up enough that we can go wander some back roads.