SED 02: Settlers of Catan Hex Holder
May. 2nd, 2015 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kerravonsenToday I finished the "hex holder" I was making for my new Settlers of Catan wooden hexes. It wasn't intended to hold all of them, indeed, I had no idea how many of them it would hold, I just wanted to make it reasonably tall.
Considering my dissatisfaction with my previous box made of melty-beads, I wanted to try a different method. I had seen people making cubes out of melty-beads by making the edges stick out like jigsaw-puzzles, and snapping them together. I thought that was a cool idea. Being terribly impatient, ambitious, and not thinking it through, I thought my first venture into snap-together boxes should be a hex-holder for my hexes... not considering that the angles of a hex are not the same as those of a cube.
Anyway, I went ahead, earlier this week (or was it last weekend?) and laid out the beads on the peg-boards. Since I needed only one hex (for the bottom) and five rectangles (I was going to leave one side open, so one could easily lift out the hexes) I was able to lay out the beads for all the sides on different peg-boards - one hex for the hex, and three square boards for the rectangles (I have six square boards that are made to be locked together, though I didn't need to lock them together for this).
So, I made the bottom hex black and white, with the edges matching the colour of the rectangle which was supposed to go on that edge. Each rectangle was a different colour, or should I say, two shades of one colour. There was blue + dark blue, green + dark green, opaque yellow + translucent yellow, opaque red + translucent red... and I ran into the lack of orange again. I wanted to put a purple rectangle in between the blue rectangle and the red one, but I didn't have enough purple. So I made a glow-in-the-dark green to go next to the yellow, and put the red next to the blue anyway.
But on Friday, some of the melty-beads I had ordered from an online shop arrived, and one of the containers was a mix of translucent colours, including a lighter purple than the one I had. So I decided to pick out a bunch of the purple, and make a purple rectangle, and put the glow-in-the-dark beads back.
So, it was time to melt the beads. This time I used the masking-tape method, and that worked pretty well. I taped up all the pieces and took them off the boards, and then got into a sort of rotation, because I had to leave time between pieces for the just-done piece to cool down under a pile of heavy things. So I set a kitchen timer for ten minutes, and went off and did something else (like messing around on the internet) and then came back when the alarm went off.
So... I had all six pieces. This is where things started to fail. Actually, I discovered the first problem as soon as I had two pieces. First of all, the rectangles wouldn't snap together with the hexagonal base, because spaces between them were different, since they were done on different-shaped pegboards. So I had to snap off all the sticky-out bits from the bottom of the rectangles. (Well, with the last three rectangles, I was able to just remove the beads, because I hadn't melted them yet).
I did manage to get most of the rectangles to snap together on their sides, some with more difficulty than others. But of course they were at right angles. I thought I could just bend them a bit and they would still stay locked but... the locking wasn't tight enough and the resultant sides were too wide to fit the base. So I ended up snapping off one side of all the sticky-out bits... and then found that the rectangles were still too wide -- another miscalculation about the different peg-board arrangement, I think. So I snapped off the other half of the sticky-out bits. That did make the rectangles narrow enough.
Then I brought out my secret weapon: my hot-glue gun! Plastic things stuck to plastic things with plastic! Voila!
Here it is:
And here it is with the hexes inside it:
I'm happier with this box than I am with the coasters-box; even though it didn't turn out like I had planned, it still worked in the end.
Am I going to make another one for the rest of my hexes? I'm not sure.
Considering my dissatisfaction with my previous box made of melty-beads, I wanted to try a different method. I had seen people making cubes out of melty-beads by making the edges stick out like jigsaw-puzzles, and snapping them together. I thought that was a cool idea. Being terribly impatient, ambitious, and not thinking it through, I thought my first venture into snap-together boxes should be a hex-holder for my hexes... not considering that the angles of a hex are not the same as those of a cube.
Anyway, I went ahead, earlier this week (or was it last weekend?) and laid out the beads on the peg-boards. Since I needed only one hex (for the bottom) and five rectangles (I was going to leave one side open, so one could easily lift out the hexes) I was able to lay out the beads for all the sides on different peg-boards - one hex for the hex, and three square boards for the rectangles (I have six square boards that are made to be locked together, though I didn't need to lock them together for this).
So, I made the bottom hex black and white, with the edges matching the colour of the rectangle which was supposed to go on that edge. Each rectangle was a different colour, or should I say, two shades of one colour. There was blue + dark blue, green + dark green, opaque yellow + translucent yellow, opaque red + translucent red... and I ran into the lack of orange again. I wanted to put a purple rectangle in between the blue rectangle and the red one, but I didn't have enough purple. So I made a glow-in-the-dark green to go next to the yellow, and put the red next to the blue anyway.
But on Friday, some of the melty-beads I had ordered from an online shop arrived, and one of the containers was a mix of translucent colours, including a lighter purple than the one I had. So I decided to pick out a bunch of the purple, and make a purple rectangle, and put the glow-in-the-dark beads back.
So, it was time to melt the beads. This time I used the masking-tape method, and that worked pretty well. I taped up all the pieces and took them off the boards, and then got into a sort of rotation, because I had to leave time between pieces for the just-done piece to cool down under a pile of heavy things. So I set a kitchen timer for ten minutes, and went off and did something else (like messing around on the internet) and then came back when the alarm went off.
So... I had all six pieces. This is where things started to fail. Actually, I discovered the first problem as soon as I had two pieces. First of all, the rectangles wouldn't snap together with the hexagonal base, because spaces between them were different, since they were done on different-shaped pegboards. So I had to snap off all the sticky-out bits from the bottom of the rectangles. (Well, with the last three rectangles, I was able to just remove the beads, because I hadn't melted them yet).
I did manage to get most of the rectangles to snap together on their sides, some with more difficulty than others. But of course they were at right angles. I thought I could just bend them a bit and they would still stay locked but... the locking wasn't tight enough and the resultant sides were too wide to fit the base. So I ended up snapping off one side of all the sticky-out bits... and then found that the rectangles were still too wide -- another miscalculation about the different peg-board arrangement, I think. So I snapped off the other half of the sticky-out bits. That did make the rectangles narrow enough.
Then I brought out my secret weapon: my hot-glue gun! Plastic things stuck to plastic things with plastic! Voila!
Here it is:
And here it is with the hexes inside it:
I'm happier with this box than I am with the coasters-box; even though it didn't turn out like I had planned, it still worked in the end.
Am I going to make another one for the rest of my hexes? I'm not sure.
