I'd like to thank the many who offered great suggestions in this
thread, to which I'd originally posted a few weeks ago. The car we
made wasn't great, but we learned a few "what not to do" things for
next year.

The car is about to be weighed and impounded. Last night, I put the
wheels on. I was really disappointed.

The big problem is that the car pulls sharply to the left. In fact,
when pushed (i.e., not using gravity), it winds up going in a circle
with a 10-12 foot radius!

I had put glue in the axle slots before putting the axles in, so I
didn't want to mess things up worse by removing the axles. I tried
pushing the front wheels a bit so as to bend the front axles to
straighten the car out, and that may have helped a bit.

What is the best way to assure straight alignment next year? And any
suggested alignment fixes for this year? I don't want to tear the
axles out. Both front wheels have (guessing) 1/16 to 1/8 an inch of
space between them and the body.

The other issue is wheel spin. I read somewhere that well-turned
axles, properly polished and lubed with plenty of graphite/moly,
should cause the wheels to spin for 20-30 seconds freely. I doubt
ours spin for much more than 10 seconds. I have added PLENTY of
graphite!

Our bottom line is we had fun working together on this (with me doing
98% of the work - my son is barely 7 - but he was watching and we were
talking the whole time). But given how much research I did on doing
things right, I wish we'd attained better results.