Thread: That time again...

Tweet

Pinewood Derby...

For all of you CHR "oldtimers", you know that my son is a scout and we have been building and racing pinewood derby cars for the last several years. Over the years I have posted some of our creations and reported the results from the events we have attended. This year is my son's last year as a cub scout and he is crossing over to the boy scouts. That means that this was his last pinewood season!

This year Cole decided he wanted to build the "Bumble Bee" car from the Transformers movie. You guys would know that to be the 2009 Camaro. Needless to say this would be quite a challenge, however I think we ended up pulling it off quite well.

The Pack race went well with Cole winning several awards including "Best of show" and "Scout's Choice" as well as finishing 2nd in the race. This was the fastest car we had ever built, but another scout was able to build a car that was consistantly faster and finished well ahead of my son's car.

The top three cars from each pack race get to represent their packs at a district event. After thinking it over, we decided we wanted to try to get more speed out of the car. I mean, what's the point of taking a 2nd place car to a bigger event and not working on it to try to make it better. Of course we wanted to try to win the district event, but that seemed to be a lofty goal since the pack winner, seemed to be much faster than we were. We decided that we would be happy if we could make the car faster than the car that had won from our pack. As things turned out we were able to improve on the speed of the car and was finished 2nd overall at district, beating the car that won our pack, and showing improvment over his 4th place finish last year. Bumble Bee also won "Best of Show" in the district design competition.

The red coupe shown in some of the photos below was the car I build for the parents "Outlaw" race. I took 2nd place in the pack race, but was also able to do some tuning and ended up winning the outlaw division at the district races.

Overall it was a pretty good year!

Dave Brisco