Pinewood Derby 2013

 I love to see Logan's holey grin!  He sure had a blast with the Cub Scouts pinewood derby this year.  We spent hours over the past month working together to come up with a plan, cut the shape, paint, glue etc.

 The first step after we came up with a design idea was to cut out the shape.  We sure wish we were in Utah at Grandpa's wood shop so that we could have the right tools for the job.... Luckily, there is a craft shop on post and a kind Korean craftsman that cut it for us on his band saw.

 Next task: sanding.  Logan spent many days after school sanding away the lines left from the band saw and smoothing the rough edges and rounding the corners.

 Next, we painted it.  First we put a couple of coats of white then taped our design and put a couple of coats of red.  We used mom's hair dryer to speed up the process.  We also started coming up with our plan to make weight (5.0 oz).  We looked everywhere to find a scale but couldn't find anything.  Thanks to our friends from church that loaned us theirs.

 Next step:  remove the tape, glue on Mario and add stickers.  We came up with the Mario kart idea when we were walking through the toy store and saw a K'nex set with a little Mario.  When I was a boy building my derby car, we used a Lego guy, and Logan loves Mario kart, so the idea was born.

 To make weight we drilled holes throughout the car and filled them with finishing nails and glue.  We also filled Mario with cut up finishing nails and heavy glue.  Finally we sat Mario on 700 Won which put us just under 5.0 oz.

 The final product.... not to bad.

 We got to the school cafeteria early to register.  Unfortunately we hit a speed bump when our car didn't fit in the box used to qualify the car designs... it was too tall.  I scrambled to fix the problem.  One of the other dads had a Dremel and I went to work cutting out space to sink Mario and his weights deeper into the car to give it a lower profile.  About 30 minutes from the deadline, one of the other dad's asked me what I was doing and when I told him about the height requirement, he pointed out that there was no height requirement.  By then, the damage had already been done and we made do.  It turns out there was a bit of a misunderstanding.  The only height requirements are specific to the track.  The box was for use on a different track...

 You can see that I scuffed up the paint job a bit while trying to make modifications.

 Here is Logan with all of the cars.  I was really impressed with the work that went into all of these cars.  One of the boys used a molding clay that hardens into a foam like consistency to make his car look like a necktie.

 Logan also participated in the coloring contest.

 Sadie made a hat out of the cones.

 What a handsome kid.

 Like father like son, my car was never the fastest.  Hopefully next year we can apply some of the lessons learned and come up with a faster car.

Logan had a blast.  A big thanks to all of the leaders that put this together for the boys.  It made Logan's day to race his car with his friends and to leave with a trophy.