About ClickRigs

When I was about seven, my dad decided we were going to build something together. He had a plastic model of a battleship sitting on a shelf, and a box of radio control parts from an airplane he'd crashed before I was born. His idea was to graft the radio parts into the model, turning the thing on the shelf into a boat that actually ran.

So every night, that became the thing we did. He'd get home from work, I'd come in from school, and we'd work on the boat. How do you power it. How do you seal it. How do you make the rudder turn. One problem at a time. Most nights we didn't finish anything. We just got one piece further.

It took months. The maiden voyage went well, until the boat got stuck in the weeds out in the middle of a half-frozen pond, took on water, and sank. A total success and a complete loss, in the same afternoon. That boat is still at the bottom of that pond. My dad is gone now too.

The only thing I actually kept from any of it were those evenings. Him and me, figuring it out, one piece at a time. So much of it was working around parts we didn't have, making one thing pretend to be another, getting close enough and calling it good.

We didn't have a 3D printer. I can't imagine how much fun we'd have had if we did, just designing the part we needed and printing it that night, then doing it again when it broke. Not every kid has a dad with a box of spare parts and a strange idea. But almost any family can have this now: a real design problem, every month, that you and your kid solve together.

Wiley Davis

Founder, ClickRigs