Got the nod from Captain Shortbus to pirate his tip session and post up the first hunting tip under his banner. He promises that more Shortbus hunting tips will follow. By the way, he did not actually ride a short bus as a kid, but probably should have! Isn't it great to have an older brother that loves you so much!
Anyway, back to the tip. I felt an obligation to share this one with all of my SF animal whacking bretheren. This borderlines on treehugger as it is so environmentally friendly...your hunting buddies might nominate your for recycling redneck of the year.
Sorry to ramble...the tip is use discarded pickup truck bedliners to build your box stand, duck blind, pit blinds, etc. walls/tops out of. Anything you would normally use plywood for walls or roof, use a truck bedliner. You can get them for free from the places that spray in the spray in type liners. They are easy to cut. The color is good, or you can paint. They are light. The list can go on. I have attached photos of a box stand I made using the recycled bed liners. The outside dimensions are 4 foot by 8 foot so that I can take several folks (kids). The entire stand was framed up with pressure treated lumber. The flat parts from discarded truck bedliners (between the wheel wells) were cut out with a razor knife and were used for all of the sheathing for the stand, including the roof. The right angle (cross-section) pieces of the bedliners that run along the top of the bed rails were cut and used to fit over/cover all of the seams where the sheathing pieces met at each of the corners of the stand, similar to the corner trim on a house. I used neoprene gasketed galvanized roofing nails to nail up all of the bedliner panels. Once in place, the bedliner “sheathing” stiffened up the walls very well. There is some kind of weird optical illusion in the photo where it looks like the corrugations are running diagonally. I actually ran them level/horizontally to minimize the seams I had to deal with. The paint seemed to stick well to the bedliner material.
Hope this is helpful...with the creativity of ya'll out there, the sky is the limit.
Probably not me. I was in downtown Raleigh quite a bit back in the late '80's/early '90s at NCSU, but my beer drinking days were gone and I was tied up studying to try and get out!