[Shotimes] pinewood derby

[bjshov8]

I guess it's like everything that people get involved in- it eventually gets
real technical and competitive.  My daughter's church has something like
this but they do it for boys and girls.  She and I built a few cars and I
built a few to enter just for fun.  Searching the internet you can find lots
of hints plus a lot of people that claim to know the real secrets but want
to sell them to you.

I read about putting the weights in the back, the theory being that the cars
start on a slant so the higher up the slope the weights are the more
potential energy is stored.  As I discovered the downside of this is that it
makes your car a little squirrely and if the track is a bit uneven like ours
was your car might be prone to jump the divider.

I also learned to polish the axles and use graphite for lube.  We weighted
the car a bit on the heavy side then took a drill with us to weigh-in so we
could fine tune the weight to just under the legal limit.  The cars that I
built were widened so that the wheels were actually shrouded within the
body, thinking it might reduce wind resistance but it also made the cars
look more realistic.

Some of the things I found on the net looked like they were designed
strictly for performance and didn't look like any normal car.  I like to
make mine look like something- one year I made my car look a bit like the
Ford GT.  I wanted the car to work well but tried to remember that we were
doing this for fun and if we didn't win we still had fun.


> It's all in the placing of the weights!  My son Colton came in first with
> his version of a SHO Pinewood Derby car.  Every single Cub Scout beat him
in
> the downhill portion but on the straight away, he killed 'em