Hee hee hee...
Mom has been working on Dad all this time, warning him that I really tried hard, and he should pretend to be pleased no matter what.
I worked on him a bit too, and warned him again just before he opened the box.
He lifted the prize from the box. For those not following the tale, it's a very nasty chess board made from the remnants of my first, badly botched attempt at making a two-species board.
The contrasting strips were all slightly different widths, and while they all joined smoothly, the joints weren't perpendicular to the edge of the glue-up. Little trapezoids I guess You'd call them. Every strip was at a different height too.
These were cut into checkered strips, and the strips were held into a board shape loosely with strips of chipped, badly-cut plywood (with random holes drilled in it) nailed around the perimeter. This loose assortment of stuff was stabilized with a couple of poorly-cut scraps nailed across the bottom at a diagonal. The resulting mess was never planed flat, and still had gobs of dried glue here and there.
I covered it with some old, almost dried-up poly/mineral spirits mixture on a cold day, so that the glop had the consistency of the orange goo inside a cat food can. I *poured* the stuff all over this, then spread it around with a piece of rusty, dirty steel wool covered with bits of grit and dry grass.
To add to the illusion that this was a real present, I filled a nice House of Staunton green courduroy bag with the pieces from one of those $3 chess checkers/backgammon sets.
He took it like a champ. His only comment was "Well, I'm glad to see you did exactly the same thing I did back in shop class."
Hee hee hee!!!!!!!
Needless to say, his jaw dropped to his knees when he saw the *real* chess box, and this whole ruse had its intended effect. He won't dwell on the problems the real one has, because it's still about 50,000 times better looking than the thing he thought he was getting.
I was too busy to get photos today, but I'll get some up over the weekend. Everybody needs to see both of these things. :)