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Derby Day
Well, Pinewood Derby day has finally come and gone. Jason was hugely excited about the whole thing, having placed second in his den last year despite all his competitors being a year older (Jason was the only Tiger cub in a den of Wolves). This year he was aiming at first.
I made sure to point out that the fun is in the building and racing, not necessarily winning, that not everyone has such good luck first time at bat and it’s entirely possible this year wouldn’t go nearly so well. All of which he took in with due sobriety. Then on Monday night his car came in first in all six heats. Ah well.
Jason’s pack uses a really nice track that has an electric eye at the finish line and connects to a laptop to report the times for up to six cars in each heat. The cool part is it calculates the speed “to scale” so you can see how fast your car would have been going if it had been full sized. Jason topped out around 194 mph, but some of the boys in the older dens were nearly at 200.
The downside to all that digital stuff is the lag time between races as information has to be typed in for each den. One of the adult leaders helped fill those spaces by acting as master of ceremonies and keeping us entertained with jokes from the boys and interviews with parents and scouts. After Jason won his races, he was asked (on microphone) how he felt about his car’s performance and answered, “Very great.” Then he was asked how he came up with the design. This is where you usually get a blank stare. Jason shot back, “Well, I studied all the winners from last year, here and at District, then I took all the best elements from those cars and combined them to make mine.”
And that’s how I learned we even had a plan. I did know he wanted flames from Day One, because the winner at District competition had flames. So that must be the secret, right? Well, he got his flames and now you’ll never convince him that wasn’t what did it for him. Maybe it was.
Incredibly, he also got the award for “most realistic” car, even though it doesn’t look like any I’ve ever seen, and the “decals” were laser-printed by me on ten-year-old label paper designed for VHS tapes, because I was too cheap to buy a 3×3 inch square of decals at the hobby shop for five bucks.
Scott went along and was a real trooper even though he didn’t have a lot to occupy him and the evening wore on until almost 10pm. Of course just as we arrived, he piped up with “I’m kind of tired,” but he did great anyway. He’s already planning his car for next year, when he finally gets to sign up as a Tiger.
So this weekend it’s on to District competition. Then Pinewood Derby is done for another year. Another year of talking about the next one.
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When I was a kid I had a Charlie Brown T-shirt that said, “Winning isn’t everything, but losing isn’t anything!”
I don’t know if I’d go that far………
Let me get this straight. You buy little parts of model cars (like wheels, seats, whatever) and then put something together that’s never been seen before? Forgive my ignorance; I’ve never been to a “derby”. How are the cars powered?
You can tell I was never in the Scouts. Anyway — you have some great events there for kiddies.
It works like this: every scout is issued a regulation kit that includes a block of pine (roughly 7 inches long by 2 1/2 inches wide), four “axles” (nails, pretty much) and four plastic wheels. The block of wood has two grooves cut across the bottom, in which you place the axles, otherwise it’s featureless.
It’s then on the scout to modify the car to suit his taste. This could be as simple as painting or drawing on the block, but more often it involves cutting it into a shape of some kind with a coping saw or (with Dad’s help) some sort of power tool(s). The shape could resemble a real car, an animal or person or almost any object, within certain guidelines, chiefly that it must be in good taste and it can’t be designed in a way that interferes with the track or other racers. Once you’ve got a shape, you can add paint, decals, figures, etc. Then you add your axles and wheels and whatever weights you can come up with to get your car up to a target weight of 5 ounces (it can be less, but not more).
The cars are “powered” by gravity alone. The track is elevated on one end and all the cars are released at the same time by a lever to roll down the track to the finish line. Winning is a matter of weight (the more the better) and friction (the less the better) and how straight you put the wheels on.
Each scout council has its own rules. In ours, you have to use the official BSA pine block, wheels and axles. However it’s a popular enough hobby that several companies offer their own kits, possibly year-round. If you’d like more info, check the official site.
The sexier version of all this is the soapbox derby, where you (at least in the old days) customized a wooden crate with axles and wheels and engineered a steering system with ropes, then sat in the box and raced down a hill yourself! I don’t know if any scouts troops still do this, but it seems to have branched off into a life of its own.