Double the Jackie Wilson. Disc 1 is an all time great collection.
My relatively basic grill has been slowly but surely trying to give up the ghost. It has silently been begging to be sent off to the great scrapyard in the sky.
I’m having none of it. I think I want my next grill to be part of some sweet outdoor kitchen extravaganza, so I’m not interested in replacing it right now. Besides that, I have [GrillGrates] for this grill and I love them, so I don’t want to have to potentially replace those.
The grill base is just inexpensive pressed steel, and after a few years of being outside and not receiving tender loving care, it is falling in on itself.
And, underneath those GrillGrates that I love so much, all the burner parts were pretty much trash at this point as well:
What was still salvageable was the upper part of the grill. The firebox wasn’t beyond saving.
Lumber is insanely expensive right now, and I also need to clean up the garage, so this is an all-scrap project:
Not shown- some old shelving that coughed up quite a bit of 3/4″ material, and a couple wheels from what might have been an old ruined push mower.
I did end up buying some gray spray paint and bolts for the wheels. Everything else was repurposed. A refurb kit is *way* cheaper than a replacement grill.
Drip pan details:
Nothing groundbreaking, but should get me a couple more seasons out of this grill. Total expense was probably about $45. The kit with replacement burner tubes, heat tents, etc, was around $30.
Attending on campus, that is. Happy students:
Charlie brought home a Burpee 3rd grade cabbage contest. I’d say it turned out pretty good, considering that it was battered and overall a little worse for wear by the time it finally got planted in the ground:
This was a 10 pound cabbage- we got two full meals out of it, with a big wedge left over for the backyard chickens. Banana for scale:
I recently consolidated our Ticket To Ride game with a [custom foamcore insert]. While I was mostly satisfied with what I created, looking at some of the fantastic examples on Reddit’s foamcore subreddit gave me an itch to go back for an improved version.
Here are a few chunks of firewood left over from a fall camping trip last year:
Here is what is left after getting resawn:
Insert a small detour here to build a box joint jig, largely based off this excellent example:
Jig in hand, time to crank out some boxes!
The wooden block is sized to exactly fit the interior dimensions of the train car boxes. The recess with the eye hook is a little handhold and a handle to let me get the block back out.
This was to support the box while I used a chisel and sandpaper to clean up the box joint fingers.
For the train cards and tickets, my holders are also dispensers. There are small risers in the bottom of the card trays to make it easy to the cards out.
The grand reveal, these can be clicked for full size images.
Social isolation in spring time could be worse. We have flowers blooming:
New social isolation skill builder- baking bread:
And our gardens are doing great at the moment- here’s a nice haul of beets:
Here at Leviathan Hall, we like Ticket to Ride and play exclusively with the 1910 expansion. We have never even opened the smaller cards that came with the base game.
I have been considering making a new box insert that would hold the expansion inside the regular game box for quite a while. My original intention was to make something from thin oak or something along those lines. In doing a little research, I realized that lots and lots of folks use foam core for custom inserts of all types.
I decided to give foamcore a try. At worst case, I would have a prototype for a later wood version.
There is a pretty active Reddit forum on foamcore, with lots of examples and tips. One of the pinned recommendations is to check out Esoteric Order of Gamers YouTube tutorials. These are pretty good starting points.
One of the best tips for me was not to overthink getting started. No real need to meticulously plan how the insert should be. Just use the box and arrange the components until the right combination reveals itself.
Foamcore goes together really quickly once the initial layout is decided. I built the outside walls and bottom first. The inside dividers came next, starting with the train compartments on the right side and just building out what I needed as I moved along.
The only place I tried to get a little clever was with the expansion cards. I added layers of foam core to the bottom that are a little narrower than the card compartments. This should make it easier to scoop the decks out of their slots. This is a shot of me working on getting the right height for my card base before final gluing. This is also the shot that best shows that the interior dividers are shorter than the outside border, to allow the game board to sit flush with the box top.
My final product came out just a little different than my initial layout. As I was building the compartments, it just flowed along nicely with the small changes in the layout suggesting themselves.
All in all, the outcome is acceptable, especially if I tell myself this is just a working prototype. Functionally, this thing is exactly what I wanted. Aesthetically, my cuts did not end up being as square as I would like them, some of my edges are slightly beveled. I also have some glue spots that show up.
This is a completely serviceable insert until I get an itch to make a version 2 in wood with removable trays for the trains, etc. Based on the timeline from when I originally thought about making a custom insert for this game until making foamcore version 1, there is solid 5 years before anything will happen.
Charlie is Hilda from the Luke Pearson series of books. Graydon is the mouse from Laura Numeroff’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
