Gravitational Drive

I know I've been slow, but trust me, I have a really lame reason! The issue at hand is my procrastination in posting about my kids' first Pine Wood Derby race.

If you'll remember, they both decided to join Cub Scouts this year. And if you're in Cub Scouts then you have to enter the Pine Wood Derby. I remember one Pine Wood Derby car from my own youth. I don't remember actually racing it, but I remember the car. Sort of. What I remember may not bear much resemblance to the truth, but I remember it well!

Back then the PWD car kit had a notch already made for the driver's seat. In profile it looked something like this (in ASCII art):

+-----------+   +-------+
|           |   |       |
|           +---+       |
+-+               +-+   |
  +---------------+ +---+

I show a couple of other notches on the bottom. I think that you glued some sort of axle housing into these notches. The idea was that the front of the car was on the left (in my drawing) and the rear was on the right.

PWD racetracks come in various configurations, but I think the most common one is an immediate slope from the starting line going into a long straightaway to the finish. Like so:

\
 \
  \
   \
    \__________________________________________________

Of course, the slope isn't quite that severe and the transition to the straightaway is more fluid.

Way back when, the cars must have been held at the starting line by something the wheels rested on, because my dear old Dad, an engineer, figured out that if we reversed the design of my car, so that the front was on the right of my drawing, then we could get almost a full inch head start on the other cars. Unfortunately, the race organizers were not cowed by the brilliance of my father and they insisted on racing my car backwards, in the traditional orientation.

I mention all this because my experience as a Dad of Pine Wood Derby racers is very different from my childhood recollections. First of all, there is no longer a notch pre-cut for the "driver". It actually makes reference to this in the directions which come with the kit, so I know that this part of my memory is not flawed. But instead of a big notch for some axle assembly, there is merely a pair of cuts for the axles (nails) to be pushed/hammered into. And the cars are held in place at the starting line by a peg in front of each position. So it really doesn't matter where you put your wheels or which end is your front — your car is held in-line with all the other cars.

And the rules specifically forbid you notching your front to allow it to extend forward of the peg!

So my children both entered cars, shown here with the awards they won:

The orange car on the left belongs to 1 of 2 and is the external fuel tank of the Space Shuttle (notice the NASA emblem). The red and white striped car on the right is 2 of 2's and is a stick of Fruit Stripe Gum, complete with Yipes, the gum's zebra mascot.

Actually, the zebra on the car is named Zak and was obtained from Vacation Bible School a couple of summers ago (they had a safari theme and we got a zebra, an elephant, a lion, a giraffe, and a bird of some sort). And Zak/Yipes had a rough first race: when the car hit the foam at the end of the track, Zak was ejected from the vehicle and left for dead on the track. 2 of 2 had to run up and rescue him before they started the second heat.

Speaking of heats, they have a lot! Cub Scouts are divided by grade into dens: Tigers (1st grade), Wolves, Bears, Webelos I, and Webelos II. Each den competes separately and there are 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners in each den. They also have a siblings category for brothers and sisters of Cub Scouts and a parents category for the adults. The siblings raced first, I assume it was to shake out any bugs in the track management system.

It's all computerized, including electronic timing down to thousandths of a second! We have four lanes on our track and each car races on each lane. If only four cars are entered (as was the case for the bears) then there are four heats with each car racing once on each lane. Points are awarded in each heat (1 point for 1st, 2 for 2nd, etc.) and the car with the fewest total points wins. If there are more than 4 cars then there are more heats with cars racing against different mixes of competitors as well as on different lanes. I think most dens had twenty (20!) races before they could declare the winners.

It was a long night.

So about those awards:

• the medal between the cars was given to 2 of 2 for participating in the race (i.e. he didn't place in the top three)
• the trophy behind the rocket fuel tank is the third place trophy won by 1 of 2's car
• the trophy behind the Fruit Stripe Gum is second place for Most Imaginative Design

Next year we plan to actually try to make our cars fast by prepping the axles and wheels better and by making sure we are as close as possible to the 5 ounce weight limit.