Friday, April 17, 2020

A Rock Wall for the Back of our Playhouse


Our daughter wanted a rock wall on the back side of our playhouse. So, we ordered a set of 20 holds, to see how far it would take us. It arrived with all screws, washers, T-nuts, and the Allen wrench. While I am a proud owner of a hammer, my available drills did not include a 7/16" - so I had to order one.


From there, it just took a few afternoon hours to the job done. It started with a sketch. Based on our estimates, for kids, a reasonable spacing of adjacent holds would be about 1ft vertically and 1.5 ft horizontally. This lead to the following sketch (the grey areas are some wooden pieces where we could not mount the holds).


  We laid out the holds in front of the playhouse, according to the plan,


and marked the locations for the holds on the playhouse.

We drilled the holes for the first bottom piece,

hammered the T-nuts into the holes from the backside (= from the interior of the house),


and fixed the hold with the two screws. 

Everything looked good, so we repeated the whole procedure for the other 19 pieces.
 The result looks good. It turns out that the 20 holds are really sufficient to cover the whole backside. And we have a very happy climber.  

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Movie Themed Notebooks


I love movies!
On these blog pages, you can find all kinds of movie props that I built during the last years. To have some movie themed items around my every day life, I have recently started a series of notebooks for which the cover artwork and the interior reflect elements of the graphic designs of different movies. I created these at Lulu.com and I am sharing these via the links posted below. Lulu is an international company and the books can be purchased worldwide. Each of the books costs less than $7 - but watch out: about every other week, lulu.com offers 10% or 15% off coupons which are valid for a few days.

All Work and No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy (The Shining, 1980)



Using the famous carpet pattern from the Overlook Hotel for the front and back cover, this notebook
features Jack Torrance's typewriter pages on the right (odd) pages, printed in light grey while the left (even) pages are empty. It can either be used as a notebook - or as an item for movie buffs. The typewriter pages are those, that I posted previously in this blog entry.
It has a size of 
5.8" x 8.2" and 82 pages. The book (and a preview) is available here: https://markus-wobisch.blogspot.com/2019/07/all-work-and-no-play-makes-jack-dull.html

GERTY 3000 / Lunar Industries (Moon, 2009)



Inspired by the fantastic (although lesser known) movie "Moon" by Duncan Jones, this notebook features two different screens from the computer GERTY 3000 on the front and back covers, together with the logo of "Lunar Industries LTD", the company that is operating the Moon base. Alternating, the double pages in the book are empty with movie-based icons on the corners (see picture), or featuring light gray math paper.
It has a size of 5.83" x 8.26" and 124 pages. The book (and a preview) is available here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/markus-wobisch/lunar-industries/paperback/product-24424576.html