Our Three Oranges: It only takes a week

Luke's Pinewood Derby was this morning—he finished in third place (out of six) for his Den, with an average speed of 174.2 mph for his three races, good for third place and a trophy. (He edged out Adam, his best friend, who averaged 174.1 mph, though neither he nor Adam seem aware of that.)

Of course, as we discussed numerous times during the week, the best part of the Pinewood Derby is making the car together. (I started playing that card pretty hard the closer we got to the event, as Luke started speculating that he was probably going to win, or at least come in second. More on that in a minute.)

Making the car really was the best part, actually, and not just something I was saying to try to prevent a scene. And the fact that it was the best part was a little surprising, given that I have low woodworking and general handiness ratings. So it took a village to produce the car, which was great. Since I waited until the final week, much to Julie's chagrin, there was a little drama too.

We started with Luke drawing the designs (you can click on the picture to make it bigger):

Then we called in the expert cutter, Uncle Jerry, who followed the specs and produced a cool shape. Luke did the sanding and we were ready for paint. (Jerry is holding the mini-Derby car Luke made out of the scrap wood.)

We put lots of coats of blue metallic spray paint on over the next few days. In the meantime we made a visit to the wheels guru, Paw Paw, who taught Luke how to wax the wheels for maximum speed. Luke spent the next few days repeatedly waxing the wheels, and also asking all of his friends at school if they were waxing their wheels. They weren't, which led Luke to conclude that the race was his for the taking.

By Thursday morning we were ready for the metallic orange stripe (Luke chose the color scheme at the hobby shop, as well as the decals). Luke did a few coats before school, and after a near disaster Thursday afternoon with the tape peeling that Julie saved with some fancy slicing and touching up, Luke was ready to put the dry transfer decals on Friday morning before school.

That left only the weighting left. Unfortunately, this responsibility fell to me. I drilled a few rough holes in the bottom of the car, chipped off a few pieces of the (real) lead cake bequeathed us by Paw Paw to the horror—which steadily increased over the next 12 hours—of Julie, and headed off to school with a sack of stuff I thought would get me through the last step.

As you might expect, things did not turn out as I expected. But thanks to the chemistry teacher (scale, pliers), advice of colleagues in science, English, and even administration (it turns out that if you carry around a Pinewood Derby car, people are excited to talk to you about it), and finally the serendipitous appearance of two of the maintenance staff (with dremel and circle cut saws and blowtorch for heating lead) in the carpentry shop, I got the lead into the car and the car's weight to 5 ounces. I oohed and aaahed and held the lead in the pliers while one of the guys heated it straight over the car; the paint only caught on fire a couple of times (no joke). But you wouldn't know all of that, the good and the bad, to look at the final product—the blue #42 there in the middle. And its official check-in weight was 141 grams; the max was 142. Not bad.

A few shots of graphite to the wheels and some spinning and we felt pretty good. Except about the graphite flecks all over the kitchen countertop where we applied the graphite, since Julie had declared the basement off-limits due to lead contamination and the Haz-Mat suits are prohibitively expensive. But I digress.

Photos from the race:

Luke and Adam watching their cars in the first heat. Luke's car is on the left; Adam's won by something like .005.