But I digress
A few things lead to the acquisition of this prop, and it was about a two or three year exercise. When the episode aired, I was interested in the prop, but not much reference existed for it. I saw a fan made version at a convention in Los Angeles a bit later. The same day, a fellow collector showed me a screen used one, and I was hooked. I wanted one! A short time later I found out that an overseas pal had obtained a screen used one, and put some pics on his website. With a bit of help, I was able to draw up plans for the endgame padd, and posted them on my website.
As with all things internet related, a huge drama/saga erupted from this. My goal was to put the plans online so that fellow fans and collectors could download them, and attempt to build a padd for their own collection. But the more nefarious faces of the internet were conspiring against me. Our old friends Dennis Stines and Rob Durham downloaded my plans, and proceeded to get dozens, if not hundreds of padd kits laser cut, which they proceeded to sell for a profit. They even went so far as to download my graphics, print those out, and offer them with the kit, along with some modified versions. So much for all my hard work. Of course, being the dork that I am, this was highly offensive to me and took the project offline.
The frustration that grew from this exercise taught me many lessons, the main one is: Don't give anything away for free, as there will always be someone around to take advantage of you. I think this was also a major turning point in my collecting career, as I also made the decision to simply stop offering stuff in general. If this was the type of thanks I was going to get from the community, then I wasn't going to help them "thank" me any more. Some have argued that I am punishing the prop community for the actions of a few individuals. First of all, I have to say, that most people don't give a rats ass about prop kits anyway, so that argument is marginal at best. Second of all, I totally forgot where I was going with this. Oh wait, now I remember. In my opinion, it was the community that supported Dennis and Rob by buying their kits, usually with full knowledge that they were ripped off from my plans. People are like that, and that's cool. I realize that I cannot change them, but I can stop them from swiping my stuff in the future. So I took to simply releasing plans for padds that were either already in wide circulation, or for projects that *I* was selling kits for. Smoke that!
So anyhow, I got rather disenchanted with the project, and just pretty much forgot about it. Couldn't really be bothered. Then, just recently, I was tooling through a friends workshop and found this on the bench. It was all pretty and finished, and I had sticky fingers, so I stole it. JUST KIDDING! JEEZE! After that tirade about stealing plans, do you really think I'd swipe a padd from a friend??? Anyhow, it's a great piece, and a nice conclusion to a long frickin story that never really needed to be told.
If you have any interest in my tutorial on making your own endgame padd, you can check it out here.