{"id":97,"date":"2008-01-28T17:47:21","date_gmt":"2008-01-28T23:47:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=97"},"modified":"2010-09-19T10:05:33","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T16:05:33","slug":"all-american-dad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/all-american-dad\/","title":{"rendered":"All-American Dad"},"content":{"rendered":"

To give my eldest son the opportunity to make a few more friends, my wife signed him up with the local scout pack.\u00c2\u00a0 Little did I know that it would involve more work for me than him.\u00c2\u00a0 So far we’ve had to build a bird house and a toolbox (both of which my father-in-law thankfully helped him out with, not I), and there seems to be a constant list of ‘belt loops’ (the new version of ‘achievement patches’) that he’s going for, requiring me to teach him how to repair a puncture on his bike, or whittle a model out of soap, or weave his own wicker man or something, just about every weekend.<\/p>\n

About a month ago he came home from Scouts with a ‘model car kit’.\u00c2\u00a0 This consisted of a block of wood about 4″ x 6″ x 2″ with four small ‘axle holes’ pre-drilled into it, four plastic wheels, and four nails.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, it’s not exactly Airfix, I thought, but we could maybe shave the wood down a bit to at least make it look<\/em> like a car.\u00c2\u00a0 I mentioned this to one of the other dads I know, and he was good enough to point out to me that I needed to do a lot<\/span> more than just that if I didn’t want my son ridiculed by the other scouts – and me ridiculed by the other fathers – on race day.\u00c2\u00a0 First, I had to fill in the pre-drilled axle holes and drill myself new ones, because the pre-drilled ones\u00c2\u00a0were “totally in the wrong place”, then I had to drill more holes into the body and sink lead weights into them.\u00c2\u00a0 The official allowed weight is no more than 5g, the wood is around 3g (even before you start cutting it to shape) and apparently if you want to stand any<\/em> chance in the race at all, it has to come in at exactly<\/span> 5g.\u00c2\u00a0 Once I had cut the car to the best aerodynamic shape I could manage, I had to sand it a smooth as a baby’s arse, with 400-grade sandpaper, then carefully paint and wax or varnish it, and then polish it over and over again, to reduce ‘wind resistance’.\u00c2\u00a0 So that was several late nights out in the ‘tool-shed (actually a built-in shelf in the garage that I ‘renovated’ by removing one of the shelves and hanging a light in it).\u00c2\u00a0 But I wasn’t done yet.\u00c2\u00a0 No, sirree.<\/p>\n

Apparently the most important thing is the ‘axles’ – you remember, those four nails that came in the box.\u00c2\u00a0 Nails come with burrs on them (invisible to the untrained eye) where they’ve been molded or cut from wire.\u00c2\u00a0 I was told I needed to grind these back so the nails were completely smooth.\u00c2\u00a0 I then had to sand the nails a bit thinner so there was less drag on the wheels, and polish the hell out of them so they looked more like chrome than whatever nails are really made out of.\u00c2\u00a0 One of the other dads also offered to lend me some magic thing he’d rigged up to ‘straighten’ the nails, but by\u00c2\u00a0this stage\u00c2\u00a0I’d kind of had enough\u00c2\u00a0and reasoned that the nails were good enough – I wasn’t building a space shuttle.\u00c2\u00a0 The final step was to lubricate the axles.\u00c2\u00a0 For some reason oil isn’t actually allowed (I initially tried bike chain oil – which worked like a dream – until I read the rule book and found this out and had to frantically clean it all off again) so everyone uses graphite.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually graphite powder -\u00c2\u00a0and lots of it.\u00c2\u00a0 Because there are a lot of scout packs out in the ‘burbs where we are, just about every hardware store in the area had sold out of graphite, and I only managed to track down a tube (and the last tube in the last shop) late on the night before the race.\u00c2\u00a0 Disaster narrowly avoided, there.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Anyway, I did get it all done in time, after many, many hours of effort – very few of which were actually spent by Finn. To his credit, he did do some of the drilling and sanding, and he also came up with the basic idea for the shape and paint job (and I get the distinct impression that even this was more than most dads will trust their kids to do) – but all the mind-stultifying nail-grinding was done by yours truly.\u00c2\u00a0 That said, I’m pretty pleased with the finished result – it certainly looked the part – and Finn seemed pretty psyched about it too.\u00c2\u00a0 He probably would have been more enthusiastic still, had I not been getting all protective by the end of the manufacturing process: “Don’t touch the bodywork, you’ll leave fingerprints on it”, “Leave the wheels alone, I’ve just graphited them”, “No, I’ll carry it – you might drop it and knock the axles out of alignment”, etc., etc.<\/p>\n

To give me<\/span> the opportunity to make a few more friends (or maybe just to wind me up, as she knows I don’t really like people) my wife signed me up to help out on race day, as part of the Pit Crew.\u00c2\u00a0 This entailed helping people get their cars conforming to the official rules, prior to racing – largely, drilling out excess weight, or supergluing on additional weight, as required.\u00c2\u00a0 They even had a laminated ‘pit pass’ for me, but thankfully stopped short of making me wear a red jumpsuit and baseball cap.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, it was fun – all these kids looking at you in awe, as you do your best not to screw up something that’s taken them (or their dads) weeks to build.\u00c2\u00a0 Apart from the one kid who just had a straight wedge of wood, colored with magic marker, with a couple of lead weights just blu-tacked to the top of it.\u00c2\u00a0 They said that there was one unnamed kid who had absolutely no help from his (drop-out \/ absentee) dad, and I’m guessing it was him.\u00c2\u00a0 It made me feel better about doing most of the work on Finn’s car myself – at least there was proof positive that I was actively engaged (albeit almost to the point of exclusion!) in my son’s life.<\/p>\n

Last Saturday was Race Day, which turned out to be an event with a capital E, with food stalls, concession stands, and all the hoopla you’d expect of a monster truck rally (yes, I’ve been to one or two…).\u00c2\u00a0 ‘Registration’ was\u00c2\u00a0highly controlled, with the kind of ultra-sensitive scales you normally only see in dope-dealer’s kitchens, and assorted wooden contraptions for making sure the car wasn’t over-size, or lacked the necessary clearance (not sure why this is important on a flat track…).\u00c2\u00a0 Once the car was checked in, it was taken away by the ‘race officials’ to make sure there was no ‘funny business’.\u00c2\u00a0 What was<\/em> funny was that the hand-carved cars that had been carried in in purpose-built felt-lined boxes (really! I half-expected to see someone carrying one on a velvet cushion, warning “Don’t touch it.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t even look at it!”) were still just dumped in the same tray as the nails’n’glue Ralph Wiggum efforts, all banging around together, being carried to the start line.<\/p>\n

The track itself was kind of like an over-sized Hot Wheels track, with four lanes, and a length of maybe 15 metres, starting from about 4ft in the air (mixing my measurement systems somewhat), and sloping down to the ground in about the first 2 yards – that’s why the weight is so important.\u00c2\u00a0 Most impressive was the automated start gates and electronic timer.\u00c2\u00a0 This was all controlled from a PC (you can actually buy software for this stuff! – Microsoft Pinewood Derby Enterprise Edition<\/em>, or something) that opened the gates to release the cars down the hill, and timed the run down to the trigger at the finish point.\u00c2\u00a0 The timer even measured seconds to three decimal places which I thought was a bit unnecessary, but with a fastest recorded time of 3.092 seconds, some 0.019 ahead of the next-fastest car, apparently not.<\/p>\n

As there were only four lanes, and around 60 cars in all, there were lots of heats.\u00c2\u00a0 Each car got to race four times, with the computer recording the times from each heat, and then re-jigging the cars for the next round according to their times.\u00c2\u00a0 At the end of everything, it spat out reports of winners by class, pack, heat, etc, etc.\u00c2\u00a0 All clever stuff.<\/p>\n

Out of our car’s four heats, we actually won one of them (at which point I learnt that\u00c2\u00a0it’s considered bad form to whoop and holler and high-five your son when you win – something to do with not making the ‘runners up’ feel bad – good job we stopped short of the belly-slams!) but came last in the other three.\u00c2\u00a0 Needless to say, we didn’t win the grand prix<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 Nor the fastest in our class, pack, or anything else.\u00c2\u00a0 We did get a prize for ‘shiniest car’ or something – remember, this is America, where “no-one is a loser” so everyone gets a prize for something.\u00c2\u00a0 Fortunately, Finn lacks my cynical eye, and seemed happy enough with it all.<\/p>\n

Me, I’m not satisfied at all<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m already planning next year’s car.\u00c2\u00a0 If I start now, maybe I can get a jump on the competition and make something truly impressive.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course I’ll need a whole new set of power tools (on top of the Dremel I bought for this year), but that’s apparently all part of being a fully-integrated American Dad…<\/p>\n

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To give my eldest son the opportunity to make a few more friends, my wife signed him up with the local scout pack.\u00c2\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,6],"tags":[67,70],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-life","tag-parenting","tag-scouts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions\/216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}