This string of comments reminds me of the Cub days with our son (now 28).
One year one of the dad's was an aeronautical engineer at one of the local
aircraft plants. As his son looked on, he opened up a box and produced a
nicely crafted, shaped and polished car; and mentioned that it had tested in
the Wichita State University wind tunnel. Needless to say a lot of father's
and son's jaws dropped.

That year the event was won by a young fellow who built his rather basic car
with the help of his single-parent mom. The test car was eliminated early.

RonB

"Tom Watson" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 26 Nov 2006 17:32:53 -0600, ()
wrote:

In article . net,
CW wrote:
Why don't you just cut the kids out entirely? Since you are going to redo
everything they do, why let them do it in the first place? It would save
you
a lot of work. Better yet, why don't you and the rest of the parents just
build, paint and race the cars yourselves? Don't bother getting the kids
involved, they can't do it right anyway.


I had similar thoughts but managed to restrain myself from expressing
them. Now that you have opened the gate, so to speak, let me be the
first to add, ME TOO!





This project was initially intended to be thus:

Mr. Watson will design and build a Pinewood Derby Garage, using time
and materials donated by Mr. Watson, so that the Pack would not have
to get into their pockets to buy a retail version of same.

It was then modified to include input and participation by the Cubbies
in the Webelo I Den that Mr. Watson's son is in.

It was then decided that there would be three meetings devoted to the
Cubbies interaction in the process.

Design Phase:

Mr. Watson does a few sketches in a CAD program and runs a
meeting on design considerations for the project. Cubbies express
their opinions and Mr. Watson redraws based on their input.

Trial Assembly Phase:

Mr. Watson goes into the shop and cuts up the parts needed to make the
agreed upon design. Mr. Watson pre-assembles the parts, then
dissasembles them, so that the Cubbies can re-assemble them during
meeting #2.

Pre-Finishing Phase:

Mr. Watson takes apart the assembly done during the previous meeting
and sands everything with 80 and 120, then applies primer. Then Mr.
Watson takes the pre-primed pieces to the final meeting, for color
coating.

Post Cubbie Meeting Phase:

Mr. Watson will sand the color coat, shoot a barrier coat of shellac,
shoot a couple of color coats of lacquer to even up the color, shoot
three clear coats of water based poly.

Caveats:

We meet in the lunch room of the local grade school. There can be no
cutting. There can be no sanding. Painting may be done but with such
materials as will clean up without leaving any mark on the school
property.

Benefits:

The Cubbies already have a sense of ownership of the project, even
though they may not participate in every step. The end result will be
something that they have contributed to in a major way.

KMHIA.





Regards,

Tom Watson

tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet (real email)

http://home.comcast.net/~tjwatson1/