Let's Go Racin'

My son does Cub Scouts with his friends at school, and it's pinewood derby time again. If you're unfamiliar, a pinewood derby is when they give you a block of wood and some wheels, and you turn it into a car. Then they race them down a hill to see who's the fastest.

I'm pretty terrible at creating fast cars. There's a lot of skill and science involved, and I just don't know anything about it. I just try to make the car look as nice as possible, but I'm not even very good at that. Woodworking really isn't my thing.

Aside from that, you're supposed to let the kid do as much as possible, which is another difficult thing to navigate.

Last year (whoops, not last year. No pinewood derby in the pandemic. Two years ago), we did a Batmobile:

When I asked him what he wanted to do this year, he said he wanted a DeLorean.

The scouts had a meeting at the cubmaster's house where the necessary tools were made available. I did my best to cut out the car the way my son wanted it, but I managed to make it a little wonky.

My wife got me a Dremel tool for art projects that I was working on a few years back, but I haven't quite learned how to best use it, so when I got it out and tried to hollow out a section of the car I managed to make that a little wonky too.

I kept working on it, gluing on some pieces to make it match my son's vision. I did try to find ways that he could help. At a certain point, I started to think that it might have been just fine if the nine-year-old had done everything. It certainly couldn't have been more wonky, at least. Maybe that's what I should do next year.

After screwing up about everything someone could possible screw up, I decided to do like they do on those cooking shows when the time is up. I just raised my hands and backed away from it. That way I couldn't mess it up any further, at least.

Here is our final product.

I think he was happy with it, even if everything looks crooked and wonky to me. So, I suppose I succeeded in the end.

They raced the cars this evening, and, as you might suspect from my description of the car's creation, his car didn't win any prizes.

It consistently came in third place, and I think that is mostly due to the fact that a new kid joined the den just this week, so all he had was a block of wood on wheels for his car. At least we were able to defeat the block of wood.

He did still have fun with the kids in his den, so it was a success in the end.

I believe we still have one more pinewood derby left, though. So, maybe next time we can actually make a fast car that wins races. The parents of the other scouts in the den, however, are made up of scientists and engineers, so if I want that to happen, I may need to get started now.