I announced to the small masses on twitter the other day that I was going to indulge in a spot of carpentry. The last bit of woodwork I did was in Mr Totton’s (I think – verify, anyone) year 9 CDT class, where I made a disastrous Cartman clock. I am rubbish at manly things like DIY.

After having purchased Forza 3 and the Official MS Wireless Race Wheel, I quickly discovered that adopting a piece of home furniture to clamp this thing to was just not going to suffice. I looked into buying something fit for purpose, but I’ve spent loads on gaming in the last two weeks, and they’re really expensive. This presented a pretty unique opportunity to do try and prove to myself that I’m not a total failure when it comes to woodwork. I set about getting my measurements for a table that I could clamp my race wheel to and rest the pedals on so as to be a self-contained, geek-tastic cockpit type affair. After annoying Charlotte for a few nights drawing squares and triangles and figuring out how high it’d need to be (something that I messed up, incidentally!), today I set about using the bench saw in our workshop to carve up an old table to make this thing.

Without going into boring details, here is revision one of my race wheel stand. Future improvements I could make one day but won’t are:

• tidying the cables
• four little rubber feet for the bottom
• painting
• replacing the bit of the pedestal mount that I split driving a screw in
• some kind of elevated plate for the pedals/a stop for the back edge

Now taking orders. It’s pretty fucking badass.

I’m not taking orders. Charlotte would kill me.

So, Charlotte and I are going to start a Scrabble league. She’s very good and ridiculously competitive, and I have a relatively good grasp of English with no ability to play Scrabble! Having said that, the current score for the league is 1-1 after a very close second game.

1-0 Charlotte

1-1 (any word with an “A” was put down by Charlotte originally. No exaggeration.

Excuse the filthy carpet – we rent.