You'll recall, perhaps, my extreme anxiety over the approach of the Cub Scout Pinewood Derby this weekend, in light of my spectacular maladroitness with woodworking and power tools. Well, whaddaya know: if you give a metrosexual twit a Dremel, amazing things can happen. We just got back home, and Matthew and his race car "Vertigo" (which he designed, and named after the U2 song, being a U2 fan) won the competition among his den, and was the fourth-fastest car in a very crowded field. He's got a first place trophy and a fourth-place trophy on his bookshelf now.
I'm truly farklempt. I was just hoping the axles didn't fall off! Matthew is over the moon. Deo gratias! Now, I can double-dose myself with Theraflu and go back to bed. It's been a pretty nasty weekend, speaking mucousally. Never thought I'd say this, but I'm kind of looking forward to next year's competition...
UPDATE: Behold, the Mario Andretti of Pack 19, in the afterglow of victory (note flecks of celebratory chocolate cupcake on face):
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Congrats - my husband ended up in the emergency room using the Exacto knife to cut in the weights on my son's pinewood derby car. Glad you had fun.
Congratulations to both of you. I missed your earlier discussion of the Pinewood Derby, but as a father of a Life Scout on his way to Eagle I recall the Cub Scout years and my angst. Like you, I am not a tool-inclined guy.
I would offer this suggestion for future years, based on my son's lack of success for four years: the woodworking has little to do with your success. Concentrate on how the wheels and nail axles work, get to the maximum allowable weight, and you will make more progress. Of course, it is fun to make the car look great, as well.
By the way, our Pack heavily emphasized the boys doing the bulk of the work on the cars, and if an entry looked too good, the Cub Master would cross-examine the parent and Scout to confirm who did the work. There was a separate parents' category that allowed adults to make cars and race them against other adults. I never bothered.
Congratulations! Give Matthew a big Attaboy.
The younger scouts are not expected to do the work by themselves. My brother's pack had an official guideline for how much work younger or older scouts would do, based loosely on age. Loosely, I say, because some of us have more aptitude to woodworking than others. I myself have next to done, though I can weld and know more than an average woman does about what goes on under the hood of a car, mostly thanks to the Army's Humvees.
Well, Matthew is too young to work with the kind of tools necessary to carving out the car, so his input was limited to the design and the decoration. And you know, I think that turned out, however inadvertently, to make all the difference. I wouldn't have chosen the design Matthew did, but because I followed his instructions, it required me to put the weight heavily toward the rear of the car. The secondary location was the center of the car, and again, because of Matthew's request, I had to put the weight on the underside. In retrospect, that seems to have made the car faster.
Awesome! My Wolf Cub son's Pinewood Derby comes up in a few weeks, and Dad is busy helping him carve and figure out the absolue best design and placement of axles and wheels. Serious stuff. I had no idea what a big deal this is for the dads, um, boys.
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