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snousleOff to Badger tomorrow morning, crack of dawn. As usual I am cooking for the setup crew. Unlike the past few years, I'm not cooking for the Golden Gate Guards run, which is wrapping up today. Doing the two runs back to back was really brutal. This year, I would have had a total breakdown.
50th anniversary of the run this year. Hard to believe.
It's nice to take two whole days to prep, I can really think about things. Packing is a real art, it's taken years to figure out how to get it just right. I must fight the urge to pack every corner of every crate; I keep forgetting that everything's going to be re-packed in a hung over delirium and it has to fit easily, not efficiently.
Glued up a couple more crates, this time to fit the propane tanks. Having to strap the tanks down during transport is a bummer, and it's so much nicer to have them just sitting in a box. It also artfully camoflages them in the field. I had been procrastinating on the glue-up, and not moving on the crate project at all, because of a variety of irrational regrets. For one, I had ordered up a thousand dollars of custom moulding for the edges, aimed at making a hundred crates, and the groove that the sides fit into is a little too big. Oops. So I spent more money finding just the right cotton book-binding tape to try out a new glue-up method using glue-soaked tape that could possibly see a crate assembled in one step. That turned out to be possible, but way too finicky. So in short, I thought "screw it" and just glued up some crates with what I had, big grooves and all, and they turned out OK. The joint that results is not perfect but there's so much glue in these things that I don't think a perfect bond is really necessary.
50th anniversary of the run this year. Hard to believe.
It's nice to take two whole days to prep, I can really think about things. Packing is a real art, it's taken years to figure out how to get it just right. I must fight the urge to pack every corner of every crate; I keep forgetting that everything's going to be re-packed in a hung over delirium and it has to fit easily, not efficiently.
Glued up a couple more crates, this time to fit the propane tanks. Having to strap the tanks down during transport is a bummer, and it's so much nicer to have them just sitting in a box. It also artfully camoflages them in the field. I had been procrastinating on the glue-up, and not moving on the crate project at all, because of a variety of irrational regrets. For one, I had ordered up a thousand dollars of custom moulding for the edges, aimed at making a hundred crates, and the groove that the sides fit into is a little too big. Oops. So I spent more money finding just the right cotton book-binding tape to try out a new glue-up method using glue-soaked tape that could possibly see a crate assembled in one step. That turned out to be possible, but way too finicky. So in short, I thought "screw it" and just glued up some crates with what I had, big grooves and all, and they turned out OK. The joint that results is not perfect but there's so much glue in these things that I don't think a perfect bond is really necessary.
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Date: 2011-08-29 04:01 pm (UTC)Yup - packing my own gear for Badger took me a good while to work out... and it doesn't stop changing, at least around the edges, because there's often something new I want to take with me, or the like. I was sorely tempted to put my duffels on the Satyrs truck since I helped load on Sunday - but I realized that I'd have to re-work a whole bunch of things that hinged on the not unreasonable assumption that the duffels would be on the bike and I just didn't have the energy to get that done before the truck loading.
For example - right now, my rain gear is in one of the duffels, at the end of the zipper where it opens, so it's reasonably accessible. If I had to move that to a saddlebag, that produces a whole series of cascade effects. (I'm not generally a superstitious person, but let's just say I'm not willing to blatantly challenge the concept of a biker without rain gear being a precipitation magnet.)
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Date: 2011-08-30 03:31 am (UTC)Do you have to have the sides snug? The crates that carry fruit and stuff, some of them do have loose panels in the channels.
You might find some strip laminate in wood to fill a smallish gap, easily. I think there is even spray on glue for laminate, these days, so it's fast.