Hey, My turn...
Here's "my" three cars...
Tomorrow night is the "weigh-in" on the "official" scale. Next Thursday... We Race!
On the left is my daughter's car, she's 8. (at our church the girls' group makes cars also, and then they compete against the boy's club.) Yeah, it's a watermelon. My wife is the artistic one and helped her with the painting. No, those aren't actual
watermelon seeds, but they
are actual seeds.
In the middle is my #2 son's car. He's turning 10 next week. We found a car that sort of looked like that (the shape) on the net and used that for inspiration. I helped him with the flames, I admit, but he did the other painting.
On the right is my #1 son's car. He's 12. I still did some of the cutting, and helped him lay out the pattern. but he did most of the sanding himself, and he did the drilling also, after I lined up the drillpress for him. And the paint is 99% his also -- the silver was rattle-can that I had, and I showed him how to do a sweeping motion and not get too close.
That thing on the top is the weight. He was thinking "tank" when we designed it together, or maybe "way cool super fast speedy tank" is more accurate. But when it came time to paint, he didn't feel like painting it like a tank. These pine blocks are really light, and when you cut so much away there isn't much left. What I hit upon last year is to use some 1/2" iron rod that I had sitting around, leftovers from the axle I made for my
flip-top tool stand. Sure I found special "pinewood derby" weights on the net, soft lead and other ingot type stuff. But really, let's be reasonable. A 3' bar of 1/2" iron rod was less than ten bucks. For my eldest's car, we made it a part of the design. For the other two, I stood the car on end and drilled a hole in from the backside using a 1/2" forstner, and then epoxied the rod in place. You can just see the tip of the rod sticking out of the back of my daughters car. (I did do a test fit, but not 100% of the way in, and it jammed when I slipped it in with the epoxy. By that time it's too late to reach for a hammer unless I wanted to turn my daughters car into kindling. Right, forget that.) For #2 son, we cut the rod in half and drilled two holes. It was left sticking out on purpose, sort of as tail pipes, but the car was over weight so I ended up grinding them almost all the way down, so they're not visible any more in this photo.
And yeah, so there they are. Last year one son took 2nd overall, much to my surprise, he'd better not count on that this year.
...art
ps: Hmm, over in
another thread, Chuck seemed to be riding Larry pretty hard about photos... yet I don't see any photos from Chuck over here. Am I missing something?
