+ruralseeker Posted November 30, 2013 Share Posted November 30, 2013 (edited) I'm making a list of all the micro geocache containers I've seen in use. (Note: This list does not reflect which ones I condone. It's just what I have found.) So far, I have some of the obvious: nano, bison tube, film container, key hider, Altoid/Skoal can (yuck), pill bottle, match container, lip balm tube, soda bottle preform.... I know I'm missing some. Can anyone list for me some containers they have often found under lamp post skirts and on guardrails that I've missed? Edited November 30, 2013 by ruralseeker Quote Link to comment
+briansnat Posted November 30, 2013 Share Posted November 30, 2013 Nalgene cryo vial, EZ dose pill containers, shotgun shell, CD case (plastic jewel boxes, and the metal ones AOL CDs came in) and cassette cases. None that I recall were found in a guardrail or LPC (Oddly, I've only found 2 LPCs out of all my finds). Quote Link to comment
+L0ne.R Posted November 30, 2013 Share Posted November 30, 2013 Fake bolt Lock with the key insertion mechanism replaced with a plug Quote Link to comment
+CEH2000 Posted November 30, 2013 Share Posted November 30, 2013 (edited) Lemonade Mix container, Duck Tape (Shaped to hold log), Empty Glue Stick container (Made to look like a snail on the outside). Edited November 30, 2013 by CEH2000 Quote Link to comment
+niraD Posted November 30, 2013 Share Posted November 30, 2013 The "Bison tube" category includes all the capsules that Bison Designs makes, plus various clones. And the "blinker" category includes both the ones designed as geocaches and the ones that started life as blinking LED jewelry. And of course, some blinkers have been embedded in some sort of camouflage object. And the "key hider" category includes both the basic magnetic keyholders, as well as the fake rocks, fake sprinklers, and other fake objects. I've also seen the pet ID capsules (which look like miniature Bison tubes), contact lens cases, breath strip containers, magnetic signs, magnetic utility box covers, and a handful of unique custom-made containers. And I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. Quote Link to comment
+ruralseeker Posted November 30, 2013 Author Share Posted November 30, 2013 The "Bison tube" category includes all the capsules that Bison Designs makes, plus various clones. And the "blinker" category includes both the ones designed as geocaches and the ones that started life as blinking LED jewelry. And of course, some blinkers have been embedded in some sort of camouflage object. And the "key hider" category includes both the basic magnetic keyholders, as well as the fake rocks, fake sprinklers, and other fake objects. Good point here. Yes, bison tube also includes pill fobs and such clones, as nano/blinker even refers to the LED original types. Thanks for your input, folks. Keep them coming. Anyone remember any other magnetic containers they've found? Quote Link to comment
+Oxford Stone Posted November 30, 2013 Share Posted November 30, 2013 Magnetic snails A couple of flat ones - magnetic sheets with paper in a plastic sleeve I've used a pill tube, Tyrozets I think they were called Saw a metal cigar tube today Quote Link to comment
+L0ne.R Posted November 30, 2013 Share Posted November 30, 2013 Centrifuge tubes. Leaky and a pain to get the scroll out. But people like to glue them to pennies and snails and gum. Quote Link to comment
+Bunya Posted December 1, 2013 Share Posted December 1, 2013 M&M containers: The trouble is, geocachers (new ones in particular) have become so used to the decreasing size of caches that I've often found these to be labelled as "small", not "micro"! Quote Link to comment
+cerberus1 Posted December 1, 2013 Share Posted December 1, 2013 Agree with Bunya, the newer crowd listing micros as smalls is happening here too. Two weeks ago I was FTF on an already apart Zippo lighter flip box (that they're sold in) and found later it was listed as a small. Quote Link to comment
+Tyrunnersaurus Rex Posted December 1, 2013 Share Posted December 1, 2013 One of the early ones I found was a film canister embedded in a chunk of concrete. Took a couple minutes to find that one because it blended in with the surroundings quite nicely. Mostly HAKs and pill bottles around here in eastern PA Quote Link to comment
+Reardon41 Posted December 1, 2013 Share Posted December 1, 2013 A whizbang, if you don't know what it is google whizbang geocache. Pretty easy to make and really a decent container. Lots of them here in central KY. Quote Link to comment
+St.Matthew Posted December 1, 2013 Share Posted December 1, 2013 A whizbang, if you don't know what it is google whizbang geocache. Pretty easy to make and really a decent container. Lots of them here in central KY. Haha we call those pop tops! As long as the creator follows the directions, then yes I agree they are decent and usually waterproof. If the creator skims on work, say hello to soggy log. Quote Link to comment
+msrubble Posted December 1, 2013 Share Posted December 1, 2013 TicTac box, "Slim Bob" (plastic bag wrapped in tape), diabetes test strip container, ointment or cosmetics jar, small glass jelly jar, earplug case, plastic Easter egg. Rarely found, in my experience: pen, finger paint tub, cosmetics case. Quote Link to comment
+L0ne.R Posted December 1, 2013 Share Posted December 1, 2013 Dollar store bead jars; Clam shell eyeglass case - found one once, very bad container. Actually just about anything small can be a micro if you figure out how to incorporate a bit of paper. We should probably come up with a list of quality watertight micro containers. Quote Link to comment
+Don_J Posted December 4, 2013 Share Posted December 4, 2013 Centrifuge tubes. Leaky and a pain to get the scroll out. But people like to glue them to pennies and snails and gum. Plus, the tether on the cap breaks on the fifth find, and is lost by the tenth. Quote Link to comment
+Sharks-N-Beans Posted December 4, 2013 Share Posted December 4, 2013 As LOneR said, anything small can be a micro. For example, we found at least one retractable pen in a lock-n-lock (described as a decoy) which contained the log. Quote Link to comment
+J Grouchy Posted December 4, 2013 Share Posted December 4, 2013 (edited) Centrifuge tubes. Leaky and a pain to get the scroll out. But people like to glue them to pennies and snails and gum. Yes...and these are the worst/most common offenders of the "no buried cache" rule. I always find these glued to a penny or a bottle cap and pushed into the ground...usually at the base of a road sign. Edited December 4, 2013 by J Grouchy Quote Link to comment
+etphoneme2plz Posted December 10, 2013 Share Posted December 10, 2013 I recently found a really cool one where the CO cut the tops off of 2 coke bottles a little below the neck where it kinda spreads out. They glued the 2 cut off pieces together and made it so one of the caps didn't unscrew. Painted them black. Worked really well!!! Quote Link to comment
+ruralseeker Posted December 11, 2013 Author Share Posted December 11, 2013 I recently found a really cool one where the CO cut the tops off of 2 coke bottles a little below the neck where it kinda spreads out. They glued the 2 cut off pieces together and made it so one of the caps didn't unscrew. Painted them black. Worked really well!!! I actually made two of those and am going to deploy them soon. Not only have I found a few, placed really well, but the Podcacher podcast did a video about it and I made one from their instructions. A little epoxy and some spray paint and you have a homemade container! Thanks for the input everyone! Keep them coming! Most of what you are mentioning are containers I hate to find. I am actually going to be using these for a number of good ideas I have. I not only plan to make a "parody" series of caches, using watertight, creative, humorous plays on the stereotypical containers, but I plan to create a "do" and "do not" list off of the lists you all are giving me. Quote Link to comment
+NYPaddleCacher Posted December 14, 2013 Share Posted December 14, 2013 I recently found a really cool one where the CO cut the tops off of 2 coke bottles a little below the neck where it kinda spreads out. They glued the 2 cut off pieces together and made it so one of the caps didn't unscrew. Painted them black. Worked really well!!! I actually made two of those and am going to deploy them soon. Not only have I found a few, placed really well, but the Podcacher podcast did a video about it and I made one from their instructions. A little epoxy and some spray paint and you have a homemade container! I made a few of them as well from some larger bottles but have not tried them out in the field. I found a cache in South Africa that was made from a 1" long piece of aluminum tubing, rubber caps on each end, and an earth magnet epoxied on the side. The total volume wasn't much more than a blinker (nano cache). Quote Link to comment
+Sharks-N-Beans Posted December 14, 2013 Share Posted December 14, 2013 I recently found a really cool one where the CO cut the tops off of 2 coke bottles a little below the neck where it kinda spreads out. They glued the 2 cut off pieces together and made it so one of the caps didn't unscrew. Painted them black. Worked really well!!! I actually made two of those and am going to deploy them soon. Not only have I found a few, placed really well, but the Podcacher podcast did a video about it and I made one from their instructions. A little epoxy and some spray paint and you have a homemade container! I made a few of them as well from some larger bottles but have not tried them out in the field. I found a cache in South Africa that was made from a 1" long piece of aluminum tubing, rubber caps on each end, and an earth magnet epoxied on the side. The total volume wasn't much more than a blinker (nano cache). Now see the earth magnet probably cost more retail than buying a nano (w/ magnet). That doesn't make sense to me. The whizbang described above it is probably the best homemade micro design we have found. Quote Link to comment
+NYPaddleCacher Posted December 14, 2013 Share Posted December 14, 2013 I recently found a really cool one where the CO cut the tops off of 2 coke bottles a little below the neck where it kinda spreads out. They glued the 2 cut off pieces together and made it so one of the caps didn't unscrew. Painted them black. Worked really well!!! I actually made two of those and am going to deploy them soon. Not only have I found a few, placed really well, but the Podcacher podcast did a video about it and I made one from their instructions. A little epoxy and some spray paint and you have a homemade container! I made a few of them as well from some larger bottles but have not tried them out in the field. I found a cache in South Africa that was made from a 1" long piece of aluminum tubing, rubber caps on each end, and an earth magnet epoxied on the side. The total volume wasn't much more than a blinker (nano cache). Now see the earth magnet probably cost more retail than buying a nano (w/ magnet). That doesn't make sense to me. The whizbang described above it is probably the best homemade micro design we have found. I suppose that if the goal were to find the least expensive container possible that might not make sense, but if that were the case, just stuff a piece of paper in a small plastic baggie and call it a cache. It may not have been an earth magnet, but just a small round magnet that was enough to keep it attached to a propeller outside an aviation themed restaurant (the cache has long been archived). In any case, I thought it was a unique, homegrown micro cache, which is what this thread is all about. Quote Link to comment
+Sharks-N-Beans Posted December 14, 2013 Share Posted December 14, 2013 I suppose that if the goal were to find the least expensive container possible that might not make sense, but if that were the case, just stuff a piece of paper in a small plastic baggie and call it a cache. It may not have been an earth magnet, but just a small round magnet that was enough to keep it attached to a propeller outside an aviation themed restaurant (the cache has long been archived). In any case, I thought it was a unique, homegrown micro cache, which is what this thread is all about. My post was not intended as a judgment of your post. Your post provoked a thought which I posted. That's how things work around here. Quote Link to comment
+tygerkat Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 Anyone see "something really different" with a difficulty of 5 in a wooded area? Quote Link to comment
+J Grouchy Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 Anyone see "something really different" with a difficulty of 5 in a wooded area? One I did find that I thought was pretty clever was a small PVC pipe fitted onto the end of a broken-off tree limb. The whole thing was then stuck into a small naturally-occuring hole in the side of a tree. It blended in VERY well and I only found it because I bumped into the limb and it moved in a way to make it obvious that it was stuck inside the hole instead of attached to the tree. It's something that is easy to do wrong (wrong type of branch for the tree, hole too big and obvious, etc.), but this one was very well done except for the part about it being easily bumped into... Another one I found (I was actually the FTF on this one) was an EXTREMELY well-crafted cache. I wish now that I had taken a photo, but it was essentially a limb that was cut in half and drilled in such a way that the ends fit together perfectly and there was a hollowed area on one side where the cache was inserted. Just explaining it doesn't do it justice, since it was placed in a way that it looked like it was just a sapling tree in the ground...but in fact it was not pushed into the ground and it didn't appear break any guidelines. Quote Link to comment
+DragonsWest Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 Listerene Pocket Packs (which are pretty horrible containers), Joeys (small zip-lock bag wrapped in camo tape, plain mini zip-lock bags, usually leak or torn after the first half dozen finds), Cryo tubes, Diabetes test strip containers, film cans, hollowed bolts or bolt heads, various plastic candy containers, mint tins, old watches, bison-type tubes, the crappy plastic inserts from smaller pill containers, plastic pill bottles, bottle pre-forms, top of plastic soda/water bottle with two caps (one cemented over old bottle neck), plastic coin tubes (kind you get from coin collector supply), old pens (with ink cartridge removed), small PVC pipe with cap on both ends, utility access plates with magnets and bagged log, hide-a-key rocks or magnetic boxes, small animal skull, plastic toy skull, plaster skull (which disintegrated), glass bottles, tiny tupperware-type or lock-n-lock-type, gutted mobile phone or pager, hollow figurines, hollow animal bone, rubber chicken (hilarious), plastic lemon/lime, flashlight body, spent ammo casing, pine cone (with and without a bison or cryo tube for log), metal bottle cap, plastic tree ornament, ... That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Quote Link to comment
+GopherGreg Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 Here's some I've found: Pill bottle Film canister matchbox container bison tubes nanos magnetic key holders Pet ID capsules Altoids tin Mechanical pencil led holder (Wasn't waterproof and the log is destroyed Plastic test tubes Beach Safes Pens (Didn't last long either) Fake bolts or screws A fake piece of glass (Could be opened from the botton and a nano sized log was inside) Tic-Tac Containers There's probably more, but that's what comes to minds. I've also often found chap-stick containers, sticking out of plastic animal's rear ends. (It's always the rear-end. The caches placed inside fake animals never come out the mouth, or paws. Only the rear. Why?!) A particularly crafty bison tube I found was hidden like this: The CO had sawed off a tree's branch. (About twice the thickness of a bison tube) He hollowed out the part of the twig sawed off, so the bison tube fit nice a snug, but was easily removed. Then there was a small strong magnet glued to the part of the tree limb still attached to the tree. There was already a small magnet on the bison tube so the two pieces of tree limb snapped together perfectly, and was already hard to spot that limb had been sawed. Since the tree the cache was hidden in had recently been trimmed there were orange little ribbons tied to the branches that had been sawed off. The Co had tied an orange ribbon similar to the other ones over the part where the magnetic limbs connected so you couldn't see where it had been sawed. The end of the branch containing the bison tube was just sawed off so it wouldn't be sawed again. The cache took me a while to find, but was a great hide. Quote Link to comment
+Jayman11 Posted January 10, 2014 Share Posted January 10, 2014 Cryo tubes Fake Rocks Fake Sprinklers Quote Link to comment
+ADKer Posted January 10, 2014 Share Posted January 10, 2014 One that I found early when I started caching was pretty cool. Someone took a plastic toy spider and hollowed it out to put the nano log in there. Then they put it in a hole in a tree in a city park. I think that's one of the most favorited ones in the area! Quote Link to comment
+TriciaG Posted January 10, 2014 Share Posted January 10, 2014 (edited) Haven't seen these listed yet: A highlighter (you pull off the bottom to get at the cache) - crappy container A ziplock bag on the back of a magnet A ziplock bag on the back of a solid metal outlet cover, with magnets attached to stick on a flat metal surface A cable connector: [Edited to try to get the cropped photo posted; stupid Photobucket...] Edited January 10, 2014 by TriciaG Quote Link to comment
+tygerkat Posted January 10, 2014 Share Posted January 10, 2014 WOW! THAT GAVE SOME GREAT IDEAS: back to hunting I"ll let you know what I find. Quote Link to comment
+DragonsWest Posted January 10, 2014 Share Posted January 10, 2014 The highlighter is a variation on the pen, but with more room. I've seen the cable insulation on the ground with a rolled up log and plastic cap, at least once. Found a reflector last night with a log tucked inside, guess I missed that one as it's not the first time I've seen that trick. Quote Link to comment
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