The Fickle Hand of Fate aka My Drum Sander and The End of Cheap Plastic

The Fickle Hand of Fate aka My Drum Sander

When I come up for name for a series of boards, I have to find a collection of of related things to match the number boards. Recently, I announced a new series, "The 10 Named Space Shuttles" to match a series of 10 Cocobolo Faced Tournament Boards. There were actually 9 shuttles produced by NASA and a 10th shuttle that was a Amusement Park Ride at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois. Unfortunately, one of the 10 boards met with an unfortunate sanding accident when going through the sanding clean-up phase and it wasn't really fixable. So, my carefully crafted series of 10 boards was reduced to 9 boards. I had to eject one of the boards. I was never 100% comfortable grouping a Space Shuttle Amusement Park ride in with the real Space Shuttles so it was an easy choice. Thus the series of 9 boards, each named after an actual NASA Space Shuttle, became "NASA's 9 Shuttle/Orbiter Vehicles". The prices on the boards named after vehicles that went into outer space (not all of NASA's Space Shuttles went into space), reflect something about the Space Travel history of the board. For example, the "Challenger" board will cost $73, for the 73 seconds that Challenger flew on it's last mission before it's catastrophic and tragic failure. The "Columbia" board will sell for $48.08 (one penny for every one of it's 4808 trips around the earth). The Discovery" board will cost $52.47, honoring it's 5247 trips around the Earth thus far.

The End of Cheap Plastic

I like a bargain as much as the next person. I've been able to keep the costs of some of my bigger/longer templates cheaper due to the fact that I had a large stash of 2 foot long Polycarbonate plastic pieces that I picked up pretty inexpensively. Alas, I've almost sold out of these pieces and will have to buy longer (2 foot long) plastic pieces at full retail. The prices on the longer templates will go up a couple of dollars to reflect this.