Pinewood derbies

My son reached Pinewood derby age this year. The cub scout troop has open racing afterwords so parents and siblings can be involved. This strikes me as a particularly good idea after a conversation I had with a coworker. I was three hours late for work courtesy of a nice six-stitch Dremel-carved divot in my palm. When he heard that I did it helping my son with the power tools portion of his pinewood derby car he said that he had nothing but bad feelings about pinewood derby cars. He related the following story to me.

For his first pinewood derby his dad sketched exactly how the car should look on the rough block of wood. Jeff had his own ideas about how the car should look and spent hours crafting and shaping it until it was exactly what he wanted. When his dad saw the final product he snapped it in two in a fit of rage.

Permanent emotional scaring and the bodily harm aside we had a great time. Galileo (we use replacement names for our kids. Thanks Howard) and I had spent the day in traffic on our way to "take your child to work day" and had plenty of time to brainstorm. What we came up with is the car pictured at the top--the MC Escher. I have a bit of advice for anyone attempting something like this. First of all it is really easy to lose your sense of spacial relations (unless you are in fact MC Escher) and consequentially saw your project in two. So have a back up kit. Also, the drastic amounts of carving will accentuate the natural warping of the wood and you will end up with a dog-legged race car. I hear from the experts that this is actually desirable because one less wheel in contact with the track means less friction and increased speed. Finally it does not leave a natural location for most of the standard weighting methods. We used zip ties and 2 heavy washers which we removed once the race was over.

My car is the Suspended Disbelief in the foreground. The arch across the middle is about 1/8 of an inch think. It is obscenely thin. Every other decision was made around ways to go with the huge gaping chasm across the bottom. Most of the other fathers assumed that is was reinforced in some way. This design also makes it difficult to place the weights but it was well worth it.