Pinewood Derby

So anybody that thinks the pinewood derby is for the kids has never been a Dad. This is supposed to be a bonding experience between a Dad and his son. It was like pulling teeth to get Ryan to help me build his car. He did help me decide on the design but even that was not an easy task. I spent several evenings and countless hours sanding and shaping his car. Then I spent several days getting the right paint job. When it was all said and done I was pretty pleased with how my...err Ryan's...car turned out. Deep red metallic with several coats of high gloss "wet look" clear coat on top. I even put three coats of the clear coat over the stickers. Ryan was in lane #3 of the very first heat. He was so proud of his car and very excited to see it race. His official weigh in weight was 4.98oz, 5oz is the max allowed so I got pretty close.







So here is the video of the first heat. Watch the excitement as Ryan's car take a big lead and wins the first heat by a car length...


...the only problem is the timer didn't run. This run didn't count. The fiddled with the timer for a bit and thought they had it figured out so they raced the cars again...this time Ryan's car came in second. Hmmm. Oh wait, the timer didn't work again!!! After several more minutes of fiddling with the timer and running some test cars they got the timer figured out. Now for Ryan's third trip down the track in the first heat. Ryan's car got third place. :(

So now Ryan is ready to run his second heat. 3rd place again.



Here is the third heat, 4th place.



4th heat, 3rd place.



Ryan won the award for the fastest looking car. I guess that is another way of saying, Wow your car looks fast, too bad it was so slow. :D



Here is a closeup of Finn McMissile. This was Trever's car and this was a tie breaker for first place. The black car was Jordan Love's car. Both of these cars were really fast all day.



Of course all the boys got a pinewood derby medal.



Ryan and Trever being goofy while showing off their certificates. Trever won 1st place in his den and 2nd place overall. Ryan won 2nd in his den (not too big a feat since his den is only 3 boys).





Trever with his 2nc place trophy. The top 3 cars in our pack will go on to regionals.



Ryan proudly displaying his car and all the hard work he...err I...put into it.





What a ton of fun we all had this year. Looking forward to next year. I certainly learned some things I need to do differently next year, not the least of which is to make Ryan do most of the work. I will spend countless creating my own car and enter it into the open division.