 Hey everybody, welcome back to my Star Wars channel. My name is David, and today we're going to talk about how to modify your inexpensive grail diary. We would be honored if you would join us. Hey, everybody, welcome back to the channel. Thanks for being here today. We're going to look at another Indiana Jones prop. Now, I know, I know this is a Star Wars channel. And of course, I love to focus on Star Wars, focus on my fandom. But as a Star Wars fan, I'm also a huge fan of the Indiana Jones franchise, as you can tell, dressed up like Indiana Jones for cosplay. Whenever I can, I'm going to do it again this October for Halloween because Indiana Jones is pretty popular right now. So let's say you are a cosplayer, you do have the costume. One of the questions we always ask is, what do we stick inside of our gas mask bag, right? There's all kinds of Indiana Jones props that we can stick in there. Maybe you want to stick the Cross of Coronado in there, or maybe the fertility idol, what have you, right? A really popular item, one I think we all want is the grail diary. Now, even if you aren't a cosplayer and maybe you just have a little display in your man cave of some Indiana Jones props or artifacts, you've probably thought about getting the grail diary for yourself. Now, if you've looked out there on the internet, there are some very inexpensive grail diaries, right? And you've probably thought to yourself, I wonder what would happen if I bought one of those cheap ones, whether they be from AliExpress or Wish or Amazon or eBay. Now, I will just pause right here and say, if you don't want to do the work, you're not into arts and crafts and you want a quality prop that's going to look great on your shelf or in your gas mask bag, then you want to go to Ramsey instead. Ramsey is going to have the very best grail diary. It's $250, but it comes ready to go. Now, I don't have one. I don't have one because it's not in the realm from my pocketbook. I wish I did, but I had to buy the inexpensive version and then upgrade it. But again, if you don't like arts and crafts, I would go to Ramsey props and get your own. So I went to AliExpress, went to AliExpress and purchased the grail diary and inserts for about $18. Now, if you buy from AliExpress, you're going to wait about a month for shipping, right? Because it's got to come from Hong Kong. And when you get it in the mail, it's going to look like this, wrapped up in paper with a little cord around it. Looks exactly like the movie prop, except for the fact that that is all printed on the page. So the stamps are printed, the labels printed, those aren't real stamps, those aren't real label. If you do get yours from Ramsey props, you will get an authentic wrapped paper with real stamps and a real label. When you unwrap it and open it up, what you're going to find is a brand new journal. Brand new journal, not exactly the same height and width of the movie use prop, but pretty close, pretty close. And the brand new journal has a light brown cover. The prop in the movie is dark brown. And then you're going to get very straight, clean, white, crisp pages where it looks like a brand new book that came off the shelf. Doesn't look anything like a worn, beat up journal that was handwritten in, right? So you're going to have to fix it. We're going to have to do some arts and crafts on it. The other thing you get is the elastic strap that holds it all together and you're going to get several inserts. Now these inserts are all paper. Most of them only printed on the front, not on the back. And no photographs, although they send you pictures that look like photographs, but they're not printed on photo quality paper. Most of the paper they send you is printed on the same exact stock and they only vary by what they look like. So it's up to you to, one, decide which inserts you're going to put in your grill. And two, how you're going to modify those inserts so they all look a little different. And then three, how are you going to modify your grill diary so that it looks like this. Now mine looks like a dark brown with some weathering. It's got sanded edges. The pages are all worn, weathered and exploded, right? They're poofy. They look like they've been wet or they've been aged or this looks like a book that's been well loved and gone through. If I take the elastic off, you can see how the pages, when they expand, they're rippled and worn. This is what you want your book to look like, right? You want your pages to have a yellowed look, a stained look, an aged look, right? You want everything to look like it's from the movie prop. You want it to look like this is something that Henry Jones Sr. wrote in himself. So how to get your prop, your inexpensive prop to look like this. Well, the first thing I did was I weathered all the pages. And the way I did that was I used a pot of coffee from yesterday, right? Not grounds in water, but actual coffee. And I dipped the entire book in coffee, soaked up all the pages, and then I laid the book with its spine upwards and let all the water drain out and kind of let all the pages dry kind of haphazardly. All that really did was turn the pages a little bit of a color. I didn't give them any of the warp that I wanted to get that warp. What I did was I went through every page, page by page with a paintbrush. OK, after the book dried and I painted two pages at a time and stuck three dimensional objects under the page, like so a bolt and a screw, like a really big one, which lifted one page off of the next below it. And when it dried, it gave it a little bit of a curl. That way, as the pages started to dry, once you get about 20 pages in, you really start to see how each page kind of has its own character when it dries. And there's a lot of pages in these diaries, a lot. Just to do 20 pages took me about an hour. So taking it out into the sun, letting it dry, going back out there, painting the next two pages, turning them, letting it dry and going through that process over and over and over again until all the pages were warped. Then I had to re-flatten the book because I don't want the book to be completely exploded. So then what I did that night is I wrapped the entire thing in rubber bands, tightening it lengthwise and widthwise. And I laid the heavy object on top of it and laid it there overnight. That compressed the book back down again. But then still it gave it a little bit of expanded and all the pages had their own unique flavor. Then it was on to the cover. So with the cover, what I did was I took black shoe polish. OK, and I first sanded the front, sanded the spine, sanded the back, sanded all the edges just to give it a little bit of wear and tear. And then I took the black shoe polish, I'd go over it, wet it and then take a paper towel and dry it off. Do it again. Any places that I thought were a little too bright or a little too light brown. If there was any like holes that pop through because of the sandpaper, I'd darken them in with the black shoe polish and then I'd rub it right off. Don't let it dry. Rub it right off with the paper towel. And what that did was it gave the cover a nice little streak look. So it looked like it had some grain work. And then the sanding the edges gave it a little bit of a little bit of a wear and tear. Then I went to the entire book and every four or five pages or eight pages, ten pages, I would dog you're a tiny corner up in the top corner or maybe the bottom corner or I would tear a tiny little piece out of the corner just so it would look like maybe if I was turning a page or being a little too hasty, maybe I accidentally tore a page or maybe Henry Jones senior wanted to highlight that page so we tore it so he could flip through and find it faster. And so that made the Grail Diary look good as a diary. Then the second stage was I had to go through all the insorts and decide which ones I wanted to keep and which ones I didn't. And to tell you the truth, I didn't keep most of them. Most of them I did not keep. There was an article about football, which I didn't keep. There was an article about the Titanic that I cut in half and only used half of it. There were several pages that were about Indiana Jones and about his different relics that he's found. And I didn't use any of those. There was two sheets of sheet music. I didn't use those except for maybe a tiny little strip that I'll show you right here. As I glued down onto this page that I thought gave this page some personality. But the rest of the pages I threw away. There was a photograph of Indie holding the Maltese Falcon, but instead it was replaced with the fertility idol. So I didn't keep that because it just didn't look realistic. So over half of those things I didn't keep. So I kept some of the money. I kept a little receipt. I kept a train ticket. I kept two stocks. I kept the camel cigarette pack and a few other things. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go through the Grail Diary page by page and show you the inserts that I did keep and hopefully give you some advice about how I modify each one. All right, so here we are. And what we're going to do right now is go through the Grail Diary page by page just to kind of show you just, you know, what I did and maybe my reasonings behind it. You can see the front is all distressed with sandpaper and black shoe polish. You can see the pages are riffled, right? I just wanted I wanted every page to kind of have its own distinct look and I didn't want anything to look like it was just, you know, a bunch of pages brand new, stuck together and wanted to look like it was really riffled through. And this just took a whole day of just aging. I have a little dot up here that kind of lets me know that this is the this is the direction to open it from. And I only use the inserts that came with the Alex Rest package. I didn't use any extra inserts. Nothing in here is from some other project. If you got the same one as me, you could do this yourself. So right away, the first page has this little folded blue ticket. And I just double stick taped it to both sides of the page. And then there's the photograph of India's dad. That's just a glue stick down and the edge right here is torn. And then I put this was a full eight and a half by 11 that I just cropped to put on here. And the best way to do that is measure your pages and then make a template out of card stock and then lay that over the things you're going to cut. And then I would trace it and then it stuck in that paper cutter so that I had straight edges. And then I just used a regular glue stick to get it down. So there's another piece. Again, this was a full eight and a half by 11. I just chopped it, you know, and then tore this bottom part off just to give it a little bit of old flair. Here's the green ticket folded right there. Some regular pages. I want to make sure that as I show it to you, I'm not losing anything out of it. And then here's the telegram that comes with it. And this was just coffee washed. I coffee washed the creases on the backside. Coffee washed the front wrinkled it so that it looked like maybe it got shoved in a pocket. And then some more. I didn't try to put stuff on every page. I just thought that was way too much. There's like a little Asian ticket that I got sitting up out of it like a bookmark. Some of these edges I dogged, I dogged. I went back and forth between dogged in the top or dogged in the bottom or I would take my fingernail on the edge. Like right here, you can see there's a little bit of a buckle. There's my fingernail and just creased it. This one's dogged up at the top up here. This cut out again, cut out of one of the documents and just ATG did or glued it right to the page. So just to give it some different color, some different texture. When you glue things to the pages, it makes the pages a little thicker, which means they'll pop a little more. So there's one of the bills that came with it. I didn't do anything to it, but distress it with coffee. That what I did was I unfolded things and put it out in the sun with coffee, this white, hot sun. And it takes out some of the pre creased edges that come with it. And then you can do your own creases. So this is one of the maps that came with it. I put a coffee stain on it, blackened out the fold lines and then put in the map. And so there's you can see the fold lines age worn and it folds right back up. And then I threw the rest of the map away. This is the camel cigarette thing. It also came with a stamp. So I just tore the stamp and glued it to the bottom. So that's my story, a little torn edge. Sometimes I take a burnt match and rub it over the edge just to kind of give it a little extra flair. This was in there and it was unfolded. So what I did was I folded it in half and double stick taped it together so it couldn't come undone. And then I did the little angle fold. So this is twice folded. So you might have yours and it's fat. I folded it in half so it would have just some dimension. And there's a dog ear. There's a dog ear, nothing on these pages. This is one of the bookmarks and it's copy stained, folded in half and the top is folded over and it peaks out the top like that so that it looks like it has some dimension. Here's another little article again, tore it out, glued it to the top of the page just to give it some. And there's lots of pages in this that are blank. So this is in there too. And I just cropped one ticket off and then cropped the top off to make it look like one ticket was was torn out. And again, coffee dried it in the sun. Here's one of the the bills just resting in there folded. Don't fold it, you know, don't don't fold it right. Off fold it, you know, crease it in a different way so that it doesn't just rest in their obscure. It should it should look like it was more haphazard than anything else. Here's another piece that was just an eight and a half by 11 with a bunch of other stuff on it. I tore it around. I age creased the crease there and I just have it inserted like that. So it's it's nice to have some things that are, you know, square hard edges and then some things that are torn edges. So here's a torn edge page here. This is this was that article about the Titanic, I think. And so just cropped it down to make it look like like a smaller article and put it in there. And those are all normal. Here's one of the telegrams. And again, I just cut the bottom off of it. You know, didn't need the whole thing. And then I also cut the edges. So I go around all the edges top and sides too, just so that when it goes in the journal, it doesn't stick out too much. You know, I don't want it to protrude too much. I want the journal to kind of envelop it, go all the way around it. So these are just the normal pages that come with it. And then here's the it looks like a stock certificate. It was an image that came off the Internet and even had a dot com at the bottom of it. So again, stuck in the paper cutter, chopped it, put age lines on the back, crinkled it up, made it look more like an actual stock certificate. I'm not showing you every page because some of the pages are there's a little tear down there at the corner down here at the bottom. On this side, I again, rip that off of one of the eight nap by eleven store around it. Glue to the page. And this is an article about the cross. I cut it out and put it on a blank page. And then right on the other side of it, I cut that out and put it on a blank page. I didn't like the blank pages. I felt like I wanted to put something on them more so than I felt like I wanted to stick like ticket stubs and, you know, randomness everywhere. This is the big blue map. And then there was a sheet that showed you all the inserts that were supposed to come in it. And inside was the club Obi-Wan logo. So I just cut that off and glued it to the inside. The map and did the same thing. I put it in a paper cutter and I trimmed off the edges so that it didn't have all the white edges and trimming the white edges off of it just made it a little bit more made the profile of it a little shorter. So and again, I'll stick it in the back and then pie some ribbons around it and compress it and make it all tight. So periodically, it's good to just jam these back down inside where they go. I'm not too committed to their location, but I kind of like how spaced out they are. And again, I think with the band on it, it pushes those bookmarks down, folds them over and gives them a little bit of, you know, personality. And then some of the pages sticking out there, I think makes it give it some personality. I like the waves in it. So that is my 18 dollar Braille diary. The only other thing that I didn't get was the shield rubbing. You know, there's a moment in Las Crusade where India unfolds this giant piece of tracing paper uses the crayon and he gets a rubbing. You can find that rubbing out on eBay for about $14. So that's what I did. I just bought that as a separate item. And when that comes, I'll stick it in my grill diary as well. So I hope I answered some questions for you or at least gave you a head start. I, of course, will be here if you want to comment down below. Ask me any questions about modifying your own grill diary. And I will help you because I think we all want this beautiful prop, right? We all want this beautiful prop. I'm really proud of mine. And I really want to help you make yours should you decide to do the arts and crafts yourself. Thanks for watching, guys. Made the force be with you. I'll see you next time. Bye.