Making a cryptex is all about understanding the mechanics. Once you do, you’ll be able to adapt the mechanism however you want. To better explain how it works, I drew up a quick 3D model of a basic cryptex withonly one lock wheel attached in Google Sketchup

The basic parts in a cryptex are an inner tube, an outer tube, and lock wheels. The inner tube is here red. The blue knob on the picture is attached to the inner tube and acts as a pin in a lock. On a complete cryptex, you’ll have one for each lock wheel. The outer tube, here yellow, should be just big enough to house the inner tube. It also needs a cut down the length of it so that the lock pins/knobs/whateveryouwanttocallthem on the inner tube can fit through the outer tube, making it possible for the inner tube to be inserted into the outer tube with the knobs sliding down the outer tube cut/track/opening/whatever.

The inner tube is what holds you “treasure”. The point of a cryptex is to make the inner tube removable only when the correct combination is entered with the lock wheels. To stop the inner tube from being removed, you have to create a barrier so that the knobs that stick out of the inner tube and through the outer tube gets stuck on something. That’s where the lock wheels come in. Their inner hole should initially be made to fit the outer tube exactly, so that the lock wheels can spin around it. The lck wheels need to be at least twice as thick as the knobs. You then need to duplicate the mechanism seen in the second picture above – half the thickness of the lock wheel should be a wider hole to let the knob spin freely, and the other half should only have a small portion of it cut out to let the knob through.

When the inner tube is inserted completely, the lock wheels will be able to spin freely because the knobs are located in the half of the lock wheel that has a cutout all the way around, like the position in the second image above. However, to remove the inner tube, all the tiny cutouts in the other half of the lock wheel also have to line up to create a single uninterrupted track for the knobs to slide through as the  inner tube is removed. Naturally, the right combination will be the one that makes all these cutouts line up, whereas any wrong combination will have at least one misaligned cutout to prevent the knobs to slide out.

This is how you make a “proper” cryptex, but it can be done simple. My cryptex doesn’t have one knob for each wheel, and it doesn’t have the two different cutouts for each lock wheel. Instead, it has only two knobs. When the inner tube is fully inserted, these knobs rest inside the 6th wheel and end cap of the cryptex, respectively. This allows the other 6 wheels – that is, number 1-5 and 7 – to move freely, even though they only have a cutout that lines up in a certain position. This is easier to make, but easier to “cheat” to open. In theory, you can open a cryptex by pulling on the inner tube while turning all wheels at different speeds. Due to the different speeds, all wheels will sooner or later line up – but it can take ages. Fewer pins/knobs like in my crpytex means you only need to line up two wheels at a time. However, my cryptex is a geocache, so if people really want to cheat that badly, go ahead.

Hopefully this made a light turn on for anyone reading it and wondering how a cryptex works. If not, well, I can’t help you. This might, however.

Anyone who’s been a geocacher for more than 5 minutes has been asked the question “is there a GPS in the cache?”. I don’t know why people would even think that, but at least with this new product from Garmin there’s a bit of electronic gadget in the cache. A Chirp is basically a tiny battery powered doohickey that sits in a cache and transmits data every couple of seconds. If you have one of the newer models of Garmin GPSr, it will be able to detect the Chirp when it’s within about 10 meters. The point is to store information like real cache coordinates, hints etc in the Chirp and have it be accessible on the GPSr when in range.

Some cachers hate this concept for all it’s worth since it’s tied to one brand (though it’s an open standard). It excludes people with old or non-Garmin GPSrs, it promotes Garmin yad-di-yad-da. The former is a rather idiotic argument as a shitload of caches exclude some users. Mystery caches that require a high IQ or math skills, multicaches that require a car etc. Just because handicapped people can’t find a forest cache or people who are bad at math can’t solve a mystery cache doesn’t mean those caches shouldn’t be there. After all, the cache owners pay for the caches themselves and do all the work, so it should be up to them what they do with it. There’s still plenty of room on the planet for caches, so no need to be picky yet.

As for promoting a brand, well guess what- someone always have to be first with a new feature. Geocaching is a very middle aged heavy hobby, and unfortunately that means there’s quite a few cachers who couldn’t turn off the screen lock if you handed them a touch screen phone. With the massive new feature sets introduced to geocaching by smartphones and recent generation GPSrs it’s going to cause more than a few grey hairs in the skulls of those people.

Anyways, that’s what the Chirp is. I bought some stuff from Amazon through a friend recently and the Chirp was a last-minute throw. I probably won’t get to use it until spring (the cold here in winter would kill either it or the battery) but it will be fun to play with when that happens, especially since there are only one (or a few) such caches in Norway yet. Where I’ll put it and whether it will be Chirp only I don’t know, but I’m going to archive many of my “tourist caches” and focus more on elaborate caches anyways so whatever I do it won’t be an LPC.

On Sunday I attended my first geocaching event, Mjøstreff. There have been other events since I started geocaching of course, but none that suited me in terms of transport and timing. This one however was located just a couple of hundred meters from where I live here in Hamar so it suited me perfectly.

It was a lot of fun, about 20 or so people stopped by in the 3.5 hours I was there (from beginning to end, since I didn’t have anything else to do). A couple of cachers I’d seen before as well as spoken to on phone, but mostly new faces. I will definitely attend more events when I have the time.

I’m also working on a new cache to place here in Hamar, and to make sure that it doesn’t suffer the same faith as others around here (one of them mine) and ending up being muggled I’ve done a bit to camouflage it. Hot glue + sand and small stones and a bit of model paint to top it off and the resulting cache is definitely more discreet than the original white plastic box. It’s obvious when you get it into the light, but the point here is to make it invisible when hidden in a dark crevice and I think it will blend in just fine.

There’s a lot of small caches around here, so it’s nto always the most interesting finds, but just having some caches to go after is nice. I tend to go for a caching walk when I have a book to read for literature class, since audiobooks means I can multitask both. That was also the case today and I went for a combined photo/geocaching walk while listening to “The Road” for next week.

Two of the ones I found were caches that I’ve tried before without finding them. Today I was mostly alone in both places and that helped a lot with finding them. Sneaking around with people all around you doesn’t look good and does influence how concentrated you are in your search, and so can mean the difference between finding it and logging a DNF.

Of course the winter is closing in and it’s getting colder and colder every day, so i should try to grab the rest before that happens. Geocaching is mostly a “no snow” sport, though there are all year caches. I should also go place some of my own around here, the place certainly needs some larger good quality cache containers with all the magnetic candy boxes around here.

One cache in particular pissed me off a lot, not because it had a bad container but because the owner wasn’t very awake when it came to maintenance. The coordinates were 15+ meters off, so 4 trips trying to find it all lead in DNFs. Ran into another cacher as well who had the same problem. When the guy finally bothered checking up on the cache, it turned out it was gone. This is a perfect example of how important it is not only to be awake as a cache owner, but also have good coordinates in the first place. I never got to log it and if/when it does get put out again I’m not sure I’m going to bother visiting it a fifth time.

On a sidenote, people interested in geocaching seem to find their way to this blog. One of my teachers and someone in class are both getting into geocaching and found this site on their own, and a couple of weeks ago a fellow cacher recognized me at the local hardware store after having seen my picture on this site. It’s both a good thing and a bad thing as it means I have to actually update this part of the site, which goes against my preference of writing informational posts instead of blog type posts.

Finally, below is a picture I took during today’s walk. I really love my DSLR, wish I’d gotten one years ago. I’ve taken 4166 pictures with it since I bought it less than 4 months ago, so at least I’m getting my money’s worth.

First I have to rant a bit about the state of this city. It’s a construction site. There are road blocks and construction everywhere, and that makes the roads death traps to pedestrians and bicyclists. On top of that, whoever designed the streets in this city apparently hates bicycles. The sidewalks have such ridiculously high edges that traversing them with a bike will either leave you on the ground, nose first, or with a broken bike.

That aside, there is also a above-average number of micro caches around here. That’s to be expected in a city environment, but there are some places where you could fit some larger caches. There also seem to be a lot of cheap caches; candy containers, that sort of thing. They don’t hold up, and way too many logs around here are wet. If you can’t put up something that will last, it’s going to be a nightmare to maintain it.

Still though, Hamar is a very nice city down by the lake Mjøsa, and some of the caches had a particularly nice view attached to them. The ones I have left are deeper into the center of the city, so those won’t be as nice unfortunately (and the bicycle-hating “under construction” roads will probably try to kill me ever harder near those).

Got 176 finds at the time of this writing. I’m in no hurry, so I won’t be racing out to get the rest unless I have time and the weather is good – which was the case this weekend. Actually have to read a book for Literature class on Tuesday (I just started a 1 year foundation course in English), so I was listening to that on audiobook (at double speed) today while caching – multitasking FTW. Still have a couple of hours left so if the weather is nice tomorrow I might do another trip to finish it.

I found some pieces of slate (rock) that I made into small rounded shapes using pliers. I then used a grinding wheel to smooth the sides and engraved them with my Dremel and a diamond tip. The front has the geocaching logo, while the back has text saying “TFTC from Cptnodegard”. I also bought two slate rock coasters a few weeks back which I engraved as “Geocoasters”, which I’ll probably use as FTF gifts. I’ll leave the smaller rock “coins” in larger caches that deserve “something special”.

Yesterday my dad and I drove up toi the Tryvann tower to get some nice panoramas. that plan didn’t go that well, but I did manage to get some cache finds on the way. Then, today, I took off into the city while the rest of the famiily was busy with work and school.

Turns out, most geocaches in Oslo are extremely boring. Nanos, micro, more micros and another nano. Out of 14 caches found today, only a single one had room for items. It’s of course a result of urban caching and if they are any larger they would be muggled, but it still gets boring.

Another issue is the amount of mugglers. They are EVERYWHERE, you simply can’t expect to be alone anywhere, so it comes down to being stealthy. A couple of caches I went to were inaccessible due to mugglers (one had the entire population of a kindergarten literally sitting on it), others required some peculiar moves to retrive the caches. Oslo isn’t exactly the small town I’m used to either, so suspecious activity isn’t a good idea. Still, I got through the day without being arrested.

The highlight of the day was one of the last caches I went to. A man was standing nearby looking at me, and since I had a visual on the cache but no way of retriving it I retreated a bit. He walked around the cache as well and I noticed that what I had though to be his cellphone in his hand looked too thick. I asked him in Norwegian if it was a GPS, and he answered in English that he didn’t understand. I asked again in English, and he said that it was. I fiched out my GPS from my pocket, showed it to him and said “I think we might be doing the same thing”. He smiled and agreed, and we both logged the cache. I talked to Bill (that was his name) for a while, he was on vacation from the US and had taken the chance to do some caching. Second time I run into geocachers on a cache, and both times have been tourists. Maybe I’ll get to meet a Norwegian geocacher one day too.

I also took some photos with my beloved DSLR. I really want the Canon 55-250mm lense to give me a bit more flexibility with close-ups, as the 18-55mm kit lense makes it hard to shoot things like birds, far away boats etc. I won’t get to edit the photos until tomorrow when I get home to a my own computer with a 1080p screen and Adobe Camera Raw, as these were more “artistic” and need some fine tuning. There are however a total of 5 new panoramas from these days in Oslo in the panoramas section (link in the top menu).

After walking around the city for literally 8 hours my feet are shot, so I’m glad to be going home tomorrow. I still have some caches to find closer to home, which I’ll try to find during the summer before I move.

The Pocket Query (automated cache data collection thingy) I use at home contains all caches within a radius of 90 km and is still withing the 1000 cache limit. The one I made for Oslo had to be as low as 13 km radius to be able to stay under thatg limit- that’s how manyh caches there are here. Even up on Ekeberg where I’m at now you don’t have to walk far to find any, and my little brother and I picked up 7 in a couploe of hours yesterday with a bike. I don’t know if there will be much caching today, but tomorrow I’m planning to roam downtown on my own which should speed up things and result in a fair number of caches. I of course also have my camera so I can do some panoramas and whatnot.

I got a tip from someone at ABi to try out ArcSoft PanoramaMaker, which is payware. It worked the first time I tried it, but subsequent stitches have been buggy and in some cases way off. It seems to be unnecessarily slow and very inaccurate, especially with pictures involving water. The final fail that made me try another app came today when I wanted to stitch 30 pictures into one epic panorama. The result that the ArcSoft software spit out after 10 minutes of working was this:

I don’t know what planet that is supposed to be, but I don’t think gravity exists on it. I then went to download Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) which is a free app that is supposed to do the same thing. After working on the exact same pictures for about a minute, it popped out this:

The full cropped photo measured a whopping 114 mega pixels, so I scaled it down to a 32 mega pixel photo that you can access by clicking the picture above (right click and open in new tab to circumvent the shadowbox popup). ICE handled it all perfectly, unlike ArcSoft’s epic fail. I knew there had to be some difference between the various software solutions, but I had not idea the difference was this big. I will of course use ICE from now on instead of that CrapSoft thing.