ARK OF THE COVENANT

Waaaay back in 2010 during my tour of my post apocalyptic life I made a decision to acquire a new hobby and that was smoking cigars!  Now at the time I wasn't in my right mind in the least bit!  To be honest of was a maniac recovering from a Judas-like scenario!  

Jump in the time machine and a few years earlier I was hanging around my good friend EDG's desk when a Thompson Cigar catalog caught my eye amidst all the hydraulic reports and bridge crap!  I picked that magazine up and took it on break.  When I opened up that magazine I felt like a big kid...all those beautiful cigars!  Right then I wanted to smoke every single one of em!  Sadly that day never came because I soon acquired a girlfriend and began a string of terrible life decisions culminating in where this post started!

May of 2010 I ordered a Thompson Cigar sampler with a 25 count humidor!  The cigars I bought were Thompson's signature brand and needless to say they weren't the best quality but it was a start!  For the record the month of May that year was probably the worst month of my life with the highlights only being the Mastodon Concert I saw with Darth Mango and Evil Arm in Champaign at the Canopy Club followed by K-Chubs graduating from U of I and me and his older bro Steveo being there to witness it!  That particular weekend was a small yet pivotal point in my cigar life!

A few years earlier I was at an auction trying to buy a table for my wife (at the time).  Sadly I didn't get that table because some arsehole old man outbid me!  I didn't want to come home empty handed so I stopped by a local antique shop and saw a Lane brand cedar chest.  A few days earlier we were at this same antique shop and she (X) fell in love with this cedar chest.  I wouldn't buy it because I was planning on dropping $$$ for that table I mentioned and the antique mall wanted $60 for that cedar chest and I thought that was outlandish!  So I stop in this antique shop and I see that same cedar chest was marked down to $10.  Apparently they couldn't sell it!  So not wanting to disappoint her I bought it!  She was surprised (but not happy, she was never happy) and I planned on restoring it for her!

I never got around to doing that before she left.  So here this cedar chest sat in my workshop!  Despite running solo I started to refinish this cedar chest to give to her as a goodwill gesture (one among many).  So I worked like a dog and finished this thing!  Now like I mentioned May was a bad bad BAD month for me.  I made an executive decision not to part with this cedar chest and instead convert it to a humidor for my aspiring cigar collection!  So that was the plan!

As I said one of the highlights in May was seeing Steveo's brother K-Chubs graduate from U of I!  While we were in town we decided to stop into a small Cigar-Pipe Shop on Green St. in Campus Town called John's Pipe Shop!  While in there we met this eccentric arshole smoking a pipe wearing the ugliest sweater vest I've ever seen.  I told this jackass my plan to convert my newly refinished Lane cedar chest to a humidor!  Instead of being a cool dude and offering advice he was a condescending prick and talked down to me.  He laughed at me and made me feel like a douche!  So I made it my mission to convert that cedar chest to a pimp ass humidor!  

I scoured the web and eventually found a forum where people had posted pics and stories of how they converted various items to humidors.  From wardrobes to coolers they used it all and made it into a functioning humidor!  However one post caught my eye...a guy who converted an old lane cedar chest to a humidor!  I read and re-read his post and began making plans to do my own conversion and prove that prick at John's wrong!  

So November 2010 I bought three Tupperware containers and filled them with floral foam from Hobby Lobby.  I filled each tub with distilled nursery water and placed them in the cedar chest.  I let the tubs sit in the chest for about a week to season the inside of chest and get the humidity and temp just right (70%, 70 degrees).  From the post I found that if you keep your cigars in the actual Spanish cedar boxes while they're in the American Cedar lines chest then it's OK!  Also I noticed that several cigar shops i visited had large humidors not lines with Spanish Cedar but rather basic rooms with hundreds of cigars in their Spanish Cedar boxes.  After I achieved the desirable humidity and temp I placed my cigars in their boxes in the cedar chest and began a long tedious process of waiting and experimenting to see if this was going to work!  

It did and rather well I should say!  Cedar chests have metal flashing bands around the lids and seal very well actually!  They hold humidity very well!  I operated the three tub system from November 2010 to July of 2012.  For the record the system I used is called passive humidification where there is no pneumatic device to control the humidity just the natural humidification provided by the tubs of floral foam and water! I also wanna say this system worked great.  However I still didn't have the humidor I wanted!  So I did another retrofit!  

Around June 2012 I bought several large sheets of Spanish Cedar aromatic veneer.  I also bought a can of marine quality, low odor contact cement.  I then took a sheet of 1/8" Birch plywood, measured my inside dimensions of my cedar chest, then cut the plywood to fit the interior on all sides and bottom.  I then lined the sheets with Spanish Cedar veneer using the contact cement.  I then fastened the sheets to the interior of the cedar chest creating a box within a box.  Lastly I lined the lid of the cedar chest with veneer!  I purchased an electronic humidification device from Cigars International.  And put all this together and I have a bulk storage humidor that can hold a shit ton of cigars out in the open without the spanish cedar boxes.  This has basically given me 4 cubic feet of storage for all my present and future!

I have less than $150 dollars int the whole project and that is great!  I can say that the damn thing is functioning well and I have around 300 cigars in it aging as I type! So if you love to collect cigars and would like to store a shit load of them and don't want to pay out the ass for a high capacity humidor...make your own...you get a helluva lot of satisfaction out of it!  I did!  Lastly that guy at John's...Buddy you can suck my D.....


Cheers!