The plant’s maintenance shop cuts sight-glass panels and gauge covers out of sheet acrylic pretty regularly, replacing cracked ones, upgrading old cloudy panels to clearer stock, and the offcuts used to just go straight into the scrap bin. I noticed this maybe two years into the job and asked one of the maintenance guys, a fellow named Owens who’s since moved to days, if he minded me grabbing some of the bigger pieces before they hit the bin. He didn’t care at all, told me take whatever I wanted, it was headed for the dumpster either way.
I didn’t have a real plan for it at first. Just started accumulating a small stack of clear and lightly tinted offcuts in my garage, telling myself I’d figure out a use eventually. What I eventually figured out was game inserts, the kind of custom organizer some hobbyists pay real money to have laser cut for a specific box, sorting compartments for tokens and cards so you’re not digging through a plastic baggie every time you set up. I don’t have a laser cutter, that’s a level of equipment past what I can justify for a hobby, but I do have a jigsaw, a drill press, and eleven years of practice being precise with tools because precision is what the job actually requires of me.
My first attempt was for Ankh, cutting compartments for the different faction pieces out of a piece of milky translucent scrap that used to be a gauge cover on the number two clarifier. It came out rougher than I’d like, the edges aren’t as clean as a proper laser cut would give you, you can see the jigsaw’s slight wander if you look closely at a curve. But it fits, it holds every piece exactly where it should, and there’s something specifically satisfying about a game box closing flush because of a tool I built with materials that were headed for a landfill otherwise.
I’ve since done two more, one for a smaller filler game that honestly didn’t need an insert but I wanted the practice, and one for Cyclades that I’m still not fully happy with and might redo once Owens brings me a better offcut. It’s not about saving money, acrylic offcuts aren’t worth much and my time isn’t exactly free either if you ran the math on it honestly. It’s more that there’s a specific kind of pleasure in taking something the job was going to throw away and turning it into something that makes a different part of my life work a little better. Denny thinks it’s a strange hobby-within-a-hobby. I think it’s just what happens when you spend enough years around precision equipment and start looking for reasons to use those same instincts on something that isn’t strictly required of you.