Since Soupo started with the Cub Scouts, it’s been one danged thing after another. We kicked it off with Laser Tag, which didn’t suck. Then we followed it up with the popcorn sale, which did. Two hours in front of the video store trying to sell popcorn and popcorn related products to people who frankly have had enough of popcorn since the Cub Scouts had been selling it saturationally for roughly four weeks. That was not a huge amount of fun. Next up, the Zoo brought a bunch of birds to the big Pack Meeting. This was educational. We learned that birds poop. A lot. The Steller’s sea eagle projectile evacuates in a “blast radius” of ten to twelve feet. Now you know too. Now we’re building a racing boat.
It’s not a big boat, which all in all is a very good thing. It’s about seven inches long and about that tall if you count all the way up the mast. The boat proper is about two inches tall. We’ve been working on the kit all weekend and it’s looking pretty sharp. Of course it comes in a kit. A simple kit, it has: the boat hull, the mast, the sail, the rudder and a keel. The hull is a roughly boat shaped block of balsa wood and we got to sand it down to its final form. By hand. With sandpaper. Two different grits of sandpaper. I thought of pulling out the Little Woman’s Mouse sander, but the boat is a block of balsa wood. With a power tool, even one called a “Mouse”, it would be a haze of wood dust floating around the garage and a toothpick in about 30 seconds. So it was the old-fashioned sandpaper for us.
Actually it was the old-fashioned sandpaper for the boy. As much as I wanted to just take it all away from Soupo and just get it done, it was his project. So he had to sand down the balsa boat. After about 20 minutes (7 1/2 were devoted to getting out the sandpaper and the boat kit) he was “tired” (admittedly, the whole thing is dead boring, especially if you’re seven)(or the seven year old’s dad) and we stopped for the night. But on the upside we had half the boat roughed in. The next day we (he) sanded out the other side of the boat. It looked much different from the raw block of wood when he was finished with his sanding. (Oh, and that’s the rule for these Cub Scout boats: It’s all sanding, no carving.) It looked like a boat shaped block of balsa wood with some sandpaper scratches in it. But the bottom was sorta rounded, so I called it a win and we moved on to the fine grit sandpaper. That was after we went to the hardware store for the fine grit sandpaper, the special glue to hold the plastic rudder and the metal keel onto the wooden boat and some spray paint to give it that colorful look.
Soupo picked out a red spray paint for his boat. “To look like blood!” Then he drew a skull on the sail (the crossed bones were a pain in the butt so he skipped them). I thought we should have gotten yellow paint and drawn a rubber ducky on the sail, but oddly enough, he didn’t go for that idea. Or my idea to put a poop deck in and have a Lego pirate on the front of his boat. At least that would have gone with his “blood and skull” motif. Kids. Sheesh. (The Little Woman shot down my idea for the naked lady figurehead. Wives. Sheesh.)
Now we have our racing boat all ready for the Raingutter Regatta. It’s Saturday at the fire station. All the Cub Scouts show up with their boats and float them in ten foot rain gutters and blow them down to the finish line with a straw. I think with all the sanding and painting and drawing and gluing Soupo really learned something about woodworking and boat building. I’m not sure exactly what he learned, but come Saturday, he’ll get to learn about the relative size of other kids’ lungs and no matter how bitchin’ your boat looks, someone will be able to blow harder. But as long as it doesn’t sink right off the pier it should be a good time.
Next up is the Pinewood Derby. Word in the Pack is some of the “boys” have been working on their cars since May. We don’t have our kit yet. Since the car is pine rather than balsa, I’ll probably be breaking out the Mouse on this one. Maybe I can use the Derby as an excuse to get that Dremel tool I’ve been wanting. Because that’s how you measure the Father-Son bond, by the tools you score building stuff. (And a Dremel tool sure beats a sheet of fine grit sandpaper and a tube of super glue.)
-Rue.
