"Jim" wrote in message
oups.com...
My son competed in his second Pinewood Derby a couple of weeks ago.
Last year he finished dead last. This year he finished 3rd from dead
last. I would like to ask for some diagnostic help from more
experienced Pinewood Derby racers. Last year and this year I read a
good bit of the material available on the Web and I thought we paid
attention to all of the important factors. Based on the behavior of
his car on the track in both years, I suspect that we had a weight
location problem.


I have story about last years pinewood derby.....

My 8 year old son bought the kit, and I totally forgot about. He wakes me up
at 8am on a saturday morning, saying "Dad, the derby is today, we forgot to
make my car"... great, we have to be there at 11am.

Most of my tools are over at a house I am rehabbing, about 30 minutes away.
Just going over there would take up at least an hour. So I see what I have
on hand. I have a cordless drill, a hammer, some nuts, washers and bolts, a
jig saw and a dremel tool, and some old red door paint and some brown spray
paint in the shed.

My son says Yugioh uses red and brown colors, and he has some yugioh
stickers. Ok, that solves that. I go ahead and draw a rough futuristic car
shape on the block of wood and cut it out with the jig saw, sand it down and
shape it further with the dremel tool and a sanding wheel.

Of course I have no scale at the house capable of measuring the weight of
the car in oz, so I have to devise someway to easily change the weight, so I
drill in hole in the "back window" and screw in a bolt with about 10 washers
on it.

I paint the car red with the door paint, and then do a faded two tone with
the brown spray paint. Boy was it ugly, but my kid thought it was pretty
cool. I had my son stand there with a hair dryer on it until it was dry
(enough) and he added his stickers, then I attached the wheels.

We get there just in time, I proceed to weight in the car, it's weigh
overweight, easy enough, brought a wrench with me and removed some washers.
After getting the weight just right, I used some graphite on the wheels.

There were about 70 cars competing, my son won 1st place. I don't think I
have ever seen him so happy. I was the hero for at least one day.