Pinewood Derby Racing 2008

Earlier this afternoon was this years Pinewood Derby racing event for Duncan's Boy Scout troop. After last year's abysmal performance we were determined to do better.

I read all the advice we got from comments to last year's post (thank you), and we applied some of them (the legal ones) to the design of this year's car. More on that later.

I also wanted to have a fall-back plan. Each den in the pack races against each other, and there are prizes for first and second place. Winners go on to regional events. There are also special prizes for categories such as most authentic design, most colorful, most creative etc. I wanted to make sure we had a running in one or more of those.

So we came up with the melon car. It was actually called Melon Car "Lee Baby" (geddit?), and labeled as such on the bottom of the car, just in case there was a special prize for best name, but the judges totally missed this.

You can see Duncan's car lined up with three others for its first heat and then the actual race. It came fourth. In its second heat it came second. Surprisingly, I'm not disappointed. In that first heat was also the eventual first and second placed cars overall for his den, and as you can see we were not that far behind. For a car that's totally not aerodynamic, this was quite an achievement.

After all the dens had raced, the special prizes were announced and the melon car won the category of wackiest car for the whole of the pack!

So what did we do?

First of all there is an area on the bottom of the car that was especially hollowed out, and a slice of weights was screwed in there. At the "weigh-in" a couple of weeks ago, we were quite a bit overweight, but it was easy to pull bits off until we were very close. There we just super glued a couple BB's to get it exactly at 5 ounces. There was nothing special about the position (front or back) for those weights. If anything, after they'd been trimmed, it was probably slightly heavier towards the rear of the car.

But I think the major factor was axle preparation. I used my Dremel in its drill press stand to take each axle, file down the rough part near the head, then applied a mixture of pumice and water with a cloth. Then we put the wheel on the axle, and the axle in the Dremel, and applied a generous puff of graphite dust, and let it spin at max. RPM's for about thirty seconds. We repeated this for each axle.

We also sand-papered the outside of each wheel to get the imperfections off, then applied wet-and-dry paper at max. RPM's, to make sure that was smooth too.

Finally, we set the wheels so that only three were touching the ground track.

Next year, I think we will try for an aerodynamic car and see if that improves things. I'm also not convinced 3 wheels are better than four, so I think we'll try for them all touching the track.

Anyhoo, even though Duncan didn't win, he came away with a big smile on his face and happily pinned the special certificate to the wall of his bedroom when we got home.

A vast improvement over last year.

[Technorati Tag: Cub Scouts]

[Technorati Tag: Pinewood Racing]

( Jan 27 2008, 05:36:55 PM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [2]

Three TV Programs And A Movie

TV viewing for me since autumn the fall has mostly been the same old programs that I watched in the previous season. I did start out watching Bionic Woman but gave up just before they stopped airing it. I found it too depressing. Too much angst being thrown about.

I stumbled upon Woman's Murder Club just before its season started and love it. It's got Angie Harmon in it, so that's a big plus, but the rest of the cast interact well, it's got interesting plots, that are very funny at times and it's based in San Francisco. So far they've done 10 episodes (out of a planned season of 13), but the writers strike has forced it off the air at the moment. Lynea did find the first four James Patterson Murder Club books at the local library book sale of Friday night, so I know what I'll be reading soon.

The other "new" one I'm going to try is Dexter. Even though it was first broadcast on Showtime (which we don't get), it's going to be aired on CBS next month (again, due to the writer's strike). I hope they don't butcher it too much.

Onto the film. About a week ago, we all watched The Simpsons Movie. As Homer says, why go to a theater to watch this when you could be watching in on your TV at home? So true. So that's what we did. After watching SpongeBob fail to make a good transition to the big screen, I was wondering how well this one would do. I don't know, but watching it on TV feels like a really good long single episode.

But here's the difference. The material is new. The jokes are almost continuous. There is a good plot. They don't try to show every character that ever appeared in the TV shows, in the film. Highly recommended.

[Technorati Tag: TV]

[Technorati Tag: Films]

[Technorati Tag: Books]

( Jan 27 2008, 08:44:18 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [5]