Having gotten into ham radio, I’ve been assembling a small, portable kit of essentials for getting on the air and making contacts. Because I have a hard time hearing and recalling callsigns, I write down their fragments as I hear them if I am not by a computer for immediate logging. So I need to have pens and pencils at hand.

Enter, my new cherry pencil case.

I then used my laser engraver to put my brand new callsign on it. Well, that was the plan anyway. I ran into the all-too-common problem of the Laserpecker LX1 freezing mid-engraving and had a LOT of trouble trying to get it to restart exactly where it left off. That was further complicated because the rotary was involved.

The result is that it looks great from a distance, but up close just makes me cringe. Oh well, it’s mine and will still hold a few pens and pencils just fine. It was a great proof of concept and was fun to mix a few hobbies.