Ever Notice How Things Never Seem to Go As Planned?

My next game is going to be a WWIII-1958 battle, but I need to make a single terrain tile for a small town with the right road layout to connect to the rest of my modular terrain, a fairly simple little project.

By chance, I am out of 12" square foam tiles, so need to cut one.  No problem, I have enough foam on hand to cut 6-7 tiles, so figured I just do that, and reduce the amount of space taken up by the foam a little.  

And then, it occurred to me that I have notable footprint of uncut 1 inch foam slabs sitting on shelves that have been taking up space since early 2019.  It hasn't been used, as it was for a terrain project, but the green 1 inch foam from Lowes was manufactured poorly, such that the thickness varied between .81 and 1.06 inches, making it really hard to use with 1" thick modular terrain.  So, I figured that I'd eventually cut it up into slabs of varying thickness for making buildings and whatnot.

This process involved cutting the foam into 1"x 7"x24" pieces, cutting off the glazed face, and then splitting them vertically into "slabs" having thickness ranging from .75" down to .06" for making walls and whatnot.  A lot simpler than it sounds, but very messy.  The process would take maybe 4 hours, and generate 45-60 gallons of foam waste and an equivalent amount of newly freed space in the basement.  Plus, there was enough foam that I may never have to do this messy job again.

A box of half inch to 3/4 inch slabs.  When 

finished I'll have two more boxes of thinner slabs.

So I grab all of the foam, sort it out, and start cutting it down on the band saw.  Going good, filled the first box and then some with slabs of stock.  Then "floink".  The blade breaks; the cutting stops.  Not a big surprise really, the blade has probably been on there for 15 years.  

An inconvenience, but not a big deal.  Got to go get cleaned up, get all of the green (and a little pink and blue dust off of me and go to the store.  Get a new blade, maybe $12-15.

Now even 7-8 years ago, there were three stores within four miles of my house, that carried as many as eight different blades for my saw, having different combinations of blade thickness and teeth per inch.  

Now, there were none.  There used to be easily, a dozen places located between my house and place of work that carried the blades.  Guess what?  Now, there are none.  

Two days and 7 hours of searching later, I found one place that will custom make the blades for $69.00.  And, I fond one store that offers one size/type of blade that will fit, but they don't carry it in stock.  The saw is a Craftsman, and that name, after bankruptcy and resurrection by a new owner, no longer offers any parts for any of my home or work floor or benchtop power tools.

So I ordered a couple of blades, which should outlast me, and they will be here in a week.  So my four hour project to save space has my whole gaming and work area filled with stacks of foam and dust for a week, Seven, ten, twenty, thirty years ago, it would have been a 25 minute inconvenience.  Progress confuses me.

So much for my brilliant plan.  First contact with the enemy, I mean saw, and it all goes to poo.

Sorry, I just had to whine a bit.