brian617

I'll sell you my Magellan eXplorist 210 for $60 free shipping. It works perfectly, it has the cable to connect to PC, and it's pretty rugged. I no longer need it because I got a phone with a built in true gps. PM if interested.

I'm selling an HP iPaq 2490b PDA with windows mobile 5. It's barely been used and includes the AC adapter, USB cable, and a 1 GB CF card. I figured I'd offer it here before going to eBay with it. Make me an offer.

First of all let me say that I'm not affiliated in any way with the site I'm linking. I just thought some of you might want to buy some of these to use as swag. woot.com is selling vivitar 4x15 binoculars in a two pack for $4.99 + shipping. If you read the copy on the site you will be informed as to the mediocre nature of the binoculars. But still, they're cheap and it beats finding a happy meal toy or a matchbox car, right? http://www.woot.com I've bought from them before and never had a problem.

I'm pretty new too but it seems to me that FTF still has to respect good trading guidelines. They may take one item but they have to leave one item.

People who exhibit cruelty to animals are more likely to exhibit that same behavior to other humans. Make sure you remind the police of that if you speak to them again on this matter.

He can do both those things. Here's basically how he handles the custom stuff. You send him a drawing or a picture or even an existing piece and tell him what exactly you want. He'll work with you until a final design is agreed upon (this is done mainly online.) Before he'll carve a wax prototype he'll send you an estimate of the labor costs. It's usually less than $100 unless your piece is unusually complex. You'll have to send him a deposit ($25 or so) before he'll start carving. Once he finishes the prototype he'll send photos for final approval. I'm not sure how he's doing it now but I think before he makes a mold of the piece he'll ask for the balance of the labor costs to be paid. Once he makes the mold he can either send it off to the casting company he uses or he'll send it to you so you can get it cast yourself. 99.99% of all clients just use his casting company. He can get stuff cast in various metals from pewter to gold to titanium. The price per unit depends on the size and complexity of the mold. So basically you pay him for the carving and mold-making and then you order a certain quantity of your piece for casting. He doesn't do any markup for custom pieces so you basically get them at cost. He's made everything from wedding bands to tsuba (the guard on a katana sword) to pendants that mirror a client's tattoos. Geocoins that bear a special logo or a name or something would be easy but a series of geocoins each with unique ID numbers is a bit of a challenge. The latter could only be done in small quantities. I'll tell him that there's some potential interest here and if he tells me he can handle the possible workload I'll post his url.

A friend of mine is a sculptor, goldsmith, and jeweler who runs his own side business making custom pieces for clients. Would that service be of interest to anyone here? He has made quite a few coins (mostly star wars coins for people wanting to fill holes in their collections) and could easily make a coin (that you design) or some such trinket to attach to a travel bug. His prices are very affordable. I wanted to gauge interest here before I reveal the link to his site.

I'm still new at this, but the method of bringing printouts of cache pages just seems really wasteful in terms of paper and printer ink. I'm going to try using my mp3 player to display cache pages. I have an iRiver 20 gig that can store and display text files on its color screen. I figure it's good enough to display the coordinates, waypoint ID, cache name, and any hints/info that I deem necessary. It can store and display pictures too so I could probably get maps in there if I wanted to. The downside is, I have to cut/paste all that information into a .txt file. So it's not going to be equal to using a PDA. Not even close. The question is, "is this method better than carrying the paper copies?" Has anyone tried anything remotely like this?

I plan to hunt for more caches in heavily wooded areas in the autumn months. I enjoy the woods more in the fall.

I'm not going to be hiding any caches until I find at least 50 (currently my n00bish total stands at 0 with one DNF) But when I DO hide one I wouldn't consider putting anything but a personalized item in there. I have a pile of hand-painted plastic goblins that I'll probably use, as well as a pile of inexpensive fine stones that I can probably make into a token of some kind. A friend of mine is a jeweler so I can get all sorts of shiny things for wholesale prices.

I'm very new here myself and I have a pretty good outdoors background... But my girlfriend has almost no hiking/camping experience and although she's expressing a lot of interest, I think the first time we're out looking for a cache together and she sees a snake or wasp's nest or gets a tick or spider on her it's gonna be all over and that will be the last cache she ever helps out on...

Name's Brian. I live in Chicago in the Edgewater neighborhood. Geocaching looks like a blast. I found the site yesterday and after 30 minutes of browsing it I was on amazon looking at GPS units (haven't bought one yet though.) Hopefully I'll get my hands on one soon and start huntin' I paint/scratch build/sculpt as a hobby so maybe I can come up with some crafty cache containers one of these days.