I Have Run Out of Yo-Yos

That’s right... I have run out of yo-yos.  Perhaps an explanation is in order...

I found my 30th Geocache today [Editor’s Note: I intended on posting this last night, but never did.  I am actually up to 39 now].  I was pretty beat from all the hiking this morning - getting to number 29 was a much longer walk than I expected but well worth it (pic is there in the upper left).  I wanted to end the day on a nice round number and give away the last of my yo-yos so I revisited an area I had failed to find one in before to give it another go.

I am glad I did.  I was harassed by swarms of mosquitos and ran face-first into more spiderwebs than I care to recall last time. Since it was in the low 50s today, though, the bog-like conditions in the forest created by Hurricane Sandy were the only thing I had to contend with.  After a five minute hunt I stumbled upon something suspicious near the base of a tree and was rewarded with an extremely satisfying “ah-HA moment” for my curiosity.  I left the last of the yo-yos I made and went home.  

I’m not surprised that the last time the thing had been found was August 28th.  I got really lucky.  By all rights, number thirty should have been a micro-cache near the same park as number 29, but it was not to be. A modern-day Sisyphus was cleaning up pine straw out of a parking lot surrounded by pine trees (by hand!) right next to the cache so I figured I’d come back after he (or the trees, I guess) quit in disgust.  

I’m guessing tomorrow... [Editor’s Note: Yep. Knocked this one out today.]

So, since I like (well, for now... my attention span isn’t all that great) to create hand-made stuff to drop off in these caches I decided to build some simple Jefferson Wheel Cyphers.   They are primarily poplar, pine, and steel.                       

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s three grand worth:

Prototype Phase:

Assembled and Drying:

Done:

        

Each one encodes a simple saying burned into the discs - lines of poetry, lines from books, movies, TV shows, songs... You know, as much of a pain as it was to make these things (project took about six hours start to finish - way too long), the hardest part was to find 10 different quotes that fit on a 40-character encoding machine without being overly short, sounding overly pretentious, seeming overly hipster, needing a huge number of nulls, etc.  

In fact, I ended up having to write a small piece of software to help optimize the distribution of nulls so the difficulty level for these things wasn’t so high.  To further make things a little more straightforward, I made it fairly obvious how the discs align once the discoverer figures out what they are holding. 

I had fun making these but since the project took entirely too much time I doubt I will make any more like this without having access to a lathe.

                                           

BTW, in case the coastalgypsies are reading this, thanks for the nice compliment regarding one of the little wooden GPS’s I left behind a while back.  Happy caching!