Brandon (and Daddy) completed his first Pinewood Derby with his Cub Scouts Pack. We were late getting our kit so we did not have a lot of time to plan it out and make it. Brandon selected a design of one of his Hot Wheels cars and I used one of Angie's Creative Memories templates to replicate the design. Robert helped a lot by using his band saw and drill press to be able to cut it out smoothly and to drill holes in order to load it full of weights to get it up to the 5 ounce limit.
Everything seemed to be coming together as I checked it out with the postal scales at work and was right at the 5.0 limit on Friday for the weigh-in and test runs that night. We weighed in a 4.9 ounces (close enough) and Brandon waited for his first test down the track. He was all excited to see how it would run. He waited at the end of the track as they let them go only to watch it stop about 5 feet from the finish line! Panic set in! I was hoping that maybe it just got off track and Brandon was anxious to run it again. This time it was probably four feet short! Dad starting trying to figure out the physics while we gathered everything up and headed out of the building. It was hard to concentrate with an upset son in the backseat and a wife questioning what was wrong with MY car.
We made a mad dash to make it to the hobby store before they closed in case I was going to start from scratch the night before the race. I started retracing all of my construction steps in my head on the way to the store to figure out where I could have went wrong. I finally settled on the axles that was on the car. I had bought some metal polish at the hobby store and it came with axles with it. In examining those axles, I thought they seemed to be smoother than the ones that came in my kit so I used them. I filed down the ridges, sanded them smooth, and polished them so they were very slick. After the disastrous test run, I compared them to the others and found they were slightly larger in diameter. I sent the kids to bed and began the process to prep the original axles to make them as smooth as possible. I could clearly see that the wheels now spun better than the others, but would it perform much better than the test runs. That night, I didn't sleep well as my mind keep analyzing and reanalyzing all the physics involved and steps that we took in building the car. I could just pray that we make it all the way to the finish line and maybe beat a car in the process.
The way the derby was set up was that it was a six lane track and each car went down it once in each track in six different heats. They throw out your slowest time down the track and then add up the other 5 for your cumulative time. There were 38 cars in the Scout division and then they took the Top 12 cumulative times to go on to the finals that would determine the Top 3 finishers. Brandon was in the third heat of the day and my heart was beating fast as they were getting the cars set. I told Angie that I was nervous as they were getting ready to race and she asked if I thought it would make it to the finish line. I was recording video of the race (see below), so I couldn't tell anything other than it finished. I was so relieved to see that it finished third in the race! My hope was that it could beat one car the whole time and it beat three in the first race. Angie and I smiled at one another and I decided that I no longer needed to find an exit in order to sneak out.
The car continued to perform pretty well. He finished fifth once (although his time was still good), third one other time, twice came in second, and came in first in one of the heats! If they had an award for the biggest improvement from the night before, we would have won by a landslide! They announced the 12 cars that were going to the final and he didn't make the cut, but we were just happy that we didn't embarrass ourselves. Later, we saw the overall standings and he was 13th! He was less than 2/100's of a second combined over 5 races from 12th place and making the finals! After it was over we went out to lunch to celebrate. I couldn't get over missing the finals by less than 2/100s of a second, which was such a change from our expectations that morning.
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