Old Meets New

On the left is a more recent Tamiya Plasma Edge R/C car that the boy got for his birthday. It’s comes as an unassembled kit. The boy worked on it for about a week with some help from me, of course. The car has been runnable for a couple months now, but we just got the paint job done yesterday.

On the right is a 25 year old RC10. Technically, my brother built it. I say technically because I also had an identical kit of my own that I built up. When we told my parents their grandson had a tenth scale R/C car of his own now, they pulled out all the old R/C equipment from when my brother and I had used them. My R/C car was in a massive state of disassembly. My brother had scavenged parts from my car over the years to keep his running. So to my way of thinking, this one is 50% mine. Plus, it’s my blog…

As far as rewarding projects go, it’s hard to top an R/C car like this one. It’s 4WD and out of the box, tops out at about 25 MPH. I’d say it’s better than building a model car because the whole point of assembling this one is getting to run it around when assembly is completed. The boy has been particularly proud of the fact that he assembled so much of it one his own. Really, the only thing I did was tighten screws and check his progress along the way. It really was his project, as I intended it.

Frankly, I’m kinda proud of myself for managing to stick to that last part.

Yesterday, we finished the paint job. The boy had picked out that blue color. I masked off the windows with tape, and he painted the black for the windows while I did the initial coat of the blue. I explained that the coat had to be light because otherwise, the paint would run under the tape edges and it wouldn’t look good. After the first coat setup, he took care of the rest.

The rest of the look are stickers that came with the kit. Again, the boy took care of putting those on. I helped a bit with a couple of the longer ones so there were no bubbles or puckers in the stickers. Nothing like a pucker to ruin a nice sticker job.

When he’d finished and reassembled it, he just sat there, staring at the car. He said “I can’t believe I made that. It looks like something I bought from a store.”

That brought a smile. He’d experienced the pleasure and pride in a job well done. That’s something I hope he becomes very familiar with.