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This brings us to the point where I, a 35 year old father of 2, am building a ~1/12 scale Panther tank out of K’nex.

Last week, Cal asked to build “A TANK”. I asked if he wanted to make a Tiger or Sherman M4E8, but he didn’t really have the background in WWII armored vehicles to make the call.

I called in my friend, a WWII reenactor and fellow jaded imperial stormtrooper veteran. He gave us the waffenamt of the Wehrmacht.

We spent about a day making it, and it’s a regognizable piece of Krupp polyoxymethylene. I posted a photo, and figured we’d scrap it and make something else soon after.

I’ve been having rough sleep for the past week, less than an hour a night no matter what I try. While I’ve been up, I started a new project. A few print-outs of tanks, and I’m putting together a rough hull design for a bigger vehicle. I’ll post up more about the design and building later, it’s still very much a work in progress.

I am trying to be faithful to the real tank when it’s fun or interesting. It has a torsion bar suspension, overlapped road wheels, a turret basket with stabilized gearing, an elevation-limited adjustable main gun, and a lot of dark-colored pieces to intimidate the Reds. But it also has fabulous rainbow tracks, courtesy of Magic Tracks.

For the past few weeks I’ve been nerding out with K’nex. My 3 year old son is an engineer, he doesn’t quite have the dexterity for Legos. I bought a set of K’Nex, remembering how much I liked them as a kid and how relatively simple and durable they were.

At first, it was mostly me putting it together and having him pick the pieces. Soon, he started clipping the rods side-on, then started connecting more pieces, and made a two-wheeled “remote control robot” that was pretty cool.

We “do projects” together all the time, from tow trucks to motorcycles to race cars to trains to a bug robot. Naturally, I take point in most of the work, but we make a good team when we’re in the zone.

I’ve got PTSD, and while I feel good most days, I’ve been having a lot of anxiety lately. We have zero room for me to do any of my normal mindfulness activities (range time and hand-loading ammo). I’ve been having fun playing with my kid, and that has helped with mindfulness and staying connected.

He asked for some gears and wheels, and I figured I’d buy some used stuff to save money and get cool parts. We moved recently, and live in tight quarters with inlaws. But we really don’t have any room for more toys, even with most of our stuff in storage.

I checked Craigslist and bought a box from a local person, and a box of bulk K’nex on eBay. I spent about $55 between the two, and figured we could get the parts we need and give away what we didn’t want. I cleared out a small toolbox to hold the expanded collection. The local box was a few hundred pieces, and we kept everything from it.

When I received the bulk package, I was surprised to find a monster box literally filled with K’nex. Like 30 pounds of them. We dumped them out after dinner to pick what we wanted, and the pile filled the area under his queen loft bed an inch thick. He started tearing through the pile, and picked up a brick axle and says “holy crap dad, this is nice”.

Quickly it was resolved that (a) we were absolutely keeping this whole pile and (b) we had to sort it out if we ever wanted to use it. We packed them into tupperware and started making stuff. We’ve spent a bunch of time playing, and I started making some stuff on my own to show him new things or just to relax and have a bit of fun.