Jen asked me to post something about Austin's first experience in the Cub Scout Pinewood Derby. I have to admit, when the time came to start getting ready for the pinewood derby I'm not sure who was more excited, me or Austin. I remember being in a couple pinewood derby's when I was a kid. I still have both my cars. I don't remember too much about making the first one but I do remember some things about the second one. I remember that I went through ALL of my Hot Wheels cars to pick out one that I wanted to have turned into a Pinewood Derby car. Once selected, my dad did a great job of transferring the essence of that Hot Wheel car design to my small rectangular block of wood.
So this year, once Austin had his car kit, we started searching the web for car designs. I didn't bring up having him check his Hot Wheels cars because I am NO WHERE NEAR skilled enough to try and transfer one of those to wood like my dad did. We searched and, honestly, all on his own Austin picked a car that was kind of a combination of a crayon box and a crayon all in one. So we printed out the design and on one of the 'build days' that one of the pack leaders hosted we went and got the design cut out. Austin helped me sand the car down to get ready for paint. We set up in the garage and Austin and I got to painting.
In the end, I actually screwed up the paint job and on the next build day we had to go so I could use a power sander and sand off the paint and try again. Anyone who knows me knows that I can be somewhat of a perfectionist and the thought of trying to repaint this car as a crayon box in the dwindling time we had left was stressing me out. (A perfectionist with very minimal artistic skills doesn't mix very well) So my amazing wife came up with the idea of printing out the crayon box design and attaching it to the car with Modge Podge.
This was an awesome idea! Some of you may know or have heard of actual cars being 'wrapped'. It's a process where a design is essentially printed out on a type of vinyl and then the car is literally wrapped with it. If done right, it looks like a really elaborate paint job on a car. A lot of service businesses do this to company cars that potential customers will see. Anyway, we printed the crayon box design out with the color modifications that Austin wanted and Austin and I 'modge podged' the design onto the car. Once it all dried, it looked amazing and you almost couldn't tell that it wasn't an actual paint job. In the picture below, the blue tip and the black section are actually paint. Austin did the white squiggle with a paint marker. The yellow section with the writing and blue stripes at the bottom is the modge podged wrap. The 2 and the 4 are actually stickers meant to represent 24 crayons in a box.
Next was getting the wheels and axles ready and on the car. I remembered from building my pinewood derby cars that my dad had put graphite lubricant on the axles and wheel hubs. A friend that I work with whose son had been in scouts had some other advice about also polishing the axles. He gave me some tools that they had used on his son's cars. I also bought 7 different grits of wet/dry sand paper and Austin and I got to polishing. We'd put an axle into the end of my drill and while Austin would pull the trigger of the drill, I would file and sand/polish the axle. He wanted to try some of the filing as well so he did that on a couple of the axles. Once all 4 'nail' axles were polished we put the graphite lubricant into the wheel hubs, slid the wheels onto the axles and then hammered the axles into the slots for them on the car. Once that was done, we had our Cubola Crayons #24 Pinewood Derby racer! We went into the race weigh in/registration and had to add just a little bit of weight to get it as close as possible to the 5oz weight limit.
Then came race day!
Austin was up for the first race of the Tiger scouts. A quick explanation, the Tiger scouts raced against each other in their own grouping and then the Wolf, Bear, and Weblo scouts all raced in a separate grouping. So in the first race, Austin was pitted against 2 other scouts from our den. The race started and Austin's Cubola car shot down the track and won the race.....except that the race software was showing that lane 3 had won. (Austin was in lane 1). The software was flipping the results of the race. So we retried the race...and again it was showing the opposite lane as winning. This time, we swapped Austin's car and the car in lane 3 (so now Austin is in lane 3 and the other car is in lane 1) and raced it again. Again it swapped, showing that lane 1 had won the race this time instead of lane 3. We then took the finish line sensor and flipped it around and still had problems. Finally it was discovered that for some reason, the software wasn't resetting the results after the race and this was causing it to incorrectly accumulate time and speed results. So got that figured out and raced Austin's heat one more time and this time (queue singing angels) HALLELUJAH! the results were correct and Austin won his heat (not to mention the 4 or 5 other 'races' that didn't count ;-)). Each car raced three times. each time in a different lane. Then all of their time and speed results were averaged. Once all the cars had raced the results came back that Austin's car won with the overall best average time and speed!
The top 3 finishers go on to race in the Boy Scout district races in April. Austin and the #2 finisher are both in the same den so our den took 2 of the top 3 spots! We'll have both boys in the district race. All the boys did really well and all the car designs were really cool.
Later in the evening during the Wolf, Bear, and Weblo races the computer running the software locked up. Due to the delay at the beginning of the race with the results being reported wrong, we were already running WAY behind so at this point Jen decided that she and Austin would go home (we did not know yet that there even was a district race). So they left...a little while later is when I discovered that there was a district race and that Austin would be in it. I sent a text message to Jen to let her know and to tell Austin that he couldn't play with his car, we'd need to put it away until districts. She text me back..."He is upset." I had been afraid of that since he couldn't wait to be able to play with his pinewood derby car alongside of mine that I'd let him have. Part of it was that it was late and he was just tired. By the next day, knowing that he and Arav would both be racing in the district races he was fine with it.
Overall it was a really awesome time. It brought back some cool memories of working on my pinewood derby cars with my dad. It was really fun (other than stressing about the paint job) working with Austin on his car and seeing him really want to try some of the different parts of building it, i.e. filing the rough parts of the axle, try spray painting, sanding the car, drawing the squiggle with the paint marker. This first pinewood derby for Austin was a really cool experience for him I think and a another good learning experience for me. As much as I stressed out about certain parts...those things didn't phase him at all. Was just another reminder that as a person...I still need to work on not being as much of a perfectionist about certain things and that as a parent....I have to be careful not to transfer that perfectionism to Austin. I want him to strive to do and be his best but that doesn't mean it has to be perfect and that if it's not, it wasn't his best effort. I fall short there sometimes and it's something I continue to struggle with and try to do better at.
Actually there is still one part of the competition we don't know the results of yet. The cars were judged by the former mayor of Snellville (I believe) as to 'best in show'. So maybe we'll win again...who knows.
I cant remember what they were looking at but it was soo cute
