Dreams can easily get lost in day to day life. Mine did just that. Luckily I’m a daydreamer, so their bound to come up again several times. A few years ago, I was going through some paperwork and found an old sketch of a concept car I’ve been designing and redesigning over the years. It started out pretty unrealistic at the time, so it never mattered how crazy it got. I kept re-envisioning it as newer technologies and ideas came along. My job was, I say was, fairly routine. I started bringing a mechanical pencil to work to “get the old band back together”.

I’d heard of digital drawing tablets. The Simbans Picasso XL was the one I settled on. It wasn’t long before the builder in me kicked in. I used to cut and tape my own toys together as a poor child. I had to see what I could do as an adult. I got better on the tablet, and move up to buying RC parts locally and online. At the time, it was as close as I could get to the real thing. Building a scale model felt great. There was no one, or even category of a store selling the types of parts I needed. My neck stayed on swivel, my eyes darted everywhere I went, looking for clear plastics of particular radiuses. Plastic bowls of certain depths. Each change here requiring an upgrade there. I knew what I wanted, but where do I find it and how do I make it all work together. It wasn’t long before I figured out the thing has to be modular. I also figured out why they say engineers hate designers.

This was the first time I could actually display what was in my head. I thought I could do that forever. Maybe even figure out how to make a career out of it. I kept improving it as best I could. I always thought I had rather unique ideas. My designs were never the most stylish. I like function above all. I like things that work, every time. I like utility. I come from a construction work background. My head was always in sci-fi, but my ass was in the real world. I was a lazy kid in a tough man’s environment. I looked for cheats everywhere. Any way to make that backbreaking work easier. I remember pushing a loaded wheelbarrow down a dim hallway of a still under construction building. I wished I was had one of these Bobcat skid steers. Lazy me, I’d probably drive it everywhere instead of walking. That was the day I stopped drawing Lamborghini lookalikes and started looking into more capable vehicles.