The Insert I Built After Hours

The shop picked up a laser cutter last year for cutting gasket material and the occasional custom bracket, and it sits mostly idle after five once everyone else clears out. I found excuses to stay late a few times before I admitted the real reason, which is that I wanted to use it to build a proper insert for a game whose stock organization is genuinely bad, cardboard dividers that don’t hold their shape and a box that rattles if you so much as pick it up wrong.

I’m not going to pretend this is some huge secret skill, plenty of people build their own inserts, there’s a whole corner of the hobby dedicated to it. What made it feel different was doing the actual measuring the same way I’d measure a shaft clearance at work, calipers on every component, a real drawing before I cut anything, tolerances built in so cards wouldn’t jam getting them in or out. My first pass came out about two millimeters too tight everywhere and I had to redo half the layers. My second pass fit perfectly, snug enough that nothing shifts in transport but loose enough that I’m not fighting the box every time I want to play.

I mentioned this to Deke at his retirement thing and he laughed, said of course I’d bring engineering tolerances to a cardboard box problem, that’s exactly the kind of thing he used to give me grief about back when I started. He’s not wrong. I’ve caught myself applying the same instinct to other stuff around the house too, a spice rack, a cable management thing under my desk, and I think it’s less about the specific skill and more about not being able to turn off the part of my brain that wants things to fit correctly once I’ve noticed they don’t.

The finished insert lives in the game’s box now, mostly invisible to anyone who plays with me, which is sort of the whole point of a good insert, nobody notices it working, they only notice when it doesn’t. I’ve thought about offering to do this for other people in my game group who have the same rattling box problem, and then I remember it took me two evenings and a redo to get one insert right. What I actually want out of the basement is plenty of space for the kids to play down there too once they’re a little older, not a side business running out of it on top of everything else. Some things are better left as a private, slightly obsessive habit than as a side hustle.