Good old cardboard to the rescue!

Any project often starts in one mind’s to address a problem or to answer a need. I have done a few of them. 

Before this, I have spent quite of bit of time thinking about what I was going to do, I did a lot of drawings (that’s a hobby of mine) and when I got satisfied with the rendering, began to cut into material and start building. 

That’s when I discovered issues that my best drawings ignored, did not see or couldn’t anticipate. The net result is that I had to do everything all over again or worse, give up the project altogether out of sheer disgust or discouragement! 

Over the years, I believe that I’ve evolved for the better, I hope, and discovered that a few pieces of cardboard could often time recreate the actual project I aimed for, without implicating all the difficulty and expense a project using real material would lead to. 

That’s when I systematically began to anticipate my creations as cardboard or carton models first. Nothing new there, architects do it all the time even though 3-D computer rendering are now ubiquitous and sometimes can replace the physical model, but sometimes with caveats. 

Recently I traded in my ten-year old Subaru for a new car and since I didn’t want to mount a ski rack on that one, I decided to have a hard, plastic box made to fit our skis and poles inside it. 

Since it’s more complicated than it might appear, I resorted to fabricating a cardboard box first. Its first iteration taught me a litany of things that will undoubtedly save me plenty of time, money and grief!