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Winning the pinewood derby
Filed under: Activities: Babies, Toys
One of the aspects of scouting that I'd heard about and would have really liked to have tried was the pinewood derby, a race using home-built, miniature, wooden racecars. I always thought it would be cool to carve a car and add wheels, basically making a racer from scratch. For me, though, it wouldn't have been so much about the winning as it would have been about designing and building a really, really cool car.If you want to make sure
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ReaderComments (Page 1 of 1)
2-08-2008 @ 12:49PM
Marcia said...I think a key part of this is the child actually participating in making choices and actually helping make the car from start to finish. My aunt and her husband just made their sons from start to finish without a bit of help or attention from their son and he won all his races. I just feel that sucks the fun out of it.
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2-08-2008 @ 3:50PM
Mike R said...I was permanently scarred as a child when my father made the dumbest looking, and slowest, pinewood derby car in existence. All without my help. We lost every race, by a large margin. I vowed that I would never put my child through that horror.
So, when my nephew asked me to help him build his car a few months ago, I agreed in an instant. Research took two weeks. We bought three pinewood kits from the Boy Scout store in order to hand-select the best pieces. The shape of the body is actually not that important, but we picked the coolest looking one possible. My woodworking equipment initially scared my nephew, but he still was able to do the rough cutting and smoothing of the body. I did the fine details when he went home for the day. The next day, he handled the first three coats of spraypaint, and I handled the last five coats. I did a few secret tricks to the axles and wheels. Finally, we used my digital scale and added weight to make sure it weighed the most possible.
My nephew learned two things. First, that I was some type of closet neurotic pinewood derby freak. Second, that hard work pays off. We won every race and came home with a nice blue ribbon.
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