My 10 year old son and 8 year old daughter have cars competing in a pinewood derby tomorrow night. They've got the cars cut and painted and I'm going to put the wheels on and add some weight tomorrow. I plan to drill some holes in the bottom and glue in some 148g .358 wadcutters that I recently cast.

Any advice on where to place the lead from front to back and if it's good to keep it low on the car for a low center of gravity etc. Any tricks to putting the wheels on for a faster time? We are allowed to use powdered graphite or silicon for a wheel lube. Car can weigh 5 ounces.

My daughter's is close to weight already with all the heavy purple candy like paint and her huge hood that looks like a 77 Buick. She only needs one 148g wadcutter. My son's more aerodynamic boattail design is going to need four 148g wadcutters.

Grandpa helped my daughter with the Buick but who knows, it'll probably win. I cut my sons car with VLD principles in mind and went for high BC. I just need to get the weight distributed right.

Bb

Get it rolling on 3 wheels....
Polish axles to a mirror finish.

What organization?

I couldn’t complete with the guy who had an Aerosoace team build his kid’s car

Skip the derby.

Take your son and daughter to a bar.

Read them passages from Iceberg Slim's autobiography. Far better use of your (and their) time.

Back 40 plus years ago we would use dry graphite on the axles, and spin them for hours to polish everything up. We would sand the parting lines out of the tires, and make sure the car sits on all 4 wheels evenly. We always kept the weight low. We would fine tune the weight with a couple small screws underneath that could be removed if it was overweight once you got to your race. We kept the weight centered in the car. When in Boy Scouts I won the whole damn shooting match. And no, my dad did very little on the car. He told me what to do and watched but I did it as per the rules at the time. Fun for all!

Biggest letdown of my childhood was when I realized that the Pinewood Derby was actually about the dad's skill and not the kids, who were supposed to be building the cars.

There are jigs that allow you to raise one of the front wheels up (so you run on 3).

The jigs also allow you to drill the axle holes in at an angle, so the wheels run on knife edge (inner edge).

Polish the axles, or buy better ones. Graphite the heck out of the wheels. They sell better wheels, as well, that are still “stock”.

Lengthen your wheelbase (rear wheels can stick out past rear of car. Do NOT extend front wheels past front of car they will get damaged if the car hits something).

We would drill out a cavity in the back of the car. Fill in with lead shotgun shot until we got the weight of car/wheels/axles up to about 4.9 oz. Use wood putty to fill in the cavity at that point. Balance point of car should be about 1/2 inch to 1 inch in front of rear axle.

You can lay the body of the car on a pencil, to see where it balances.

Lol...that was me. I was lucky enough to to have a dad that let me lose. A lot.

Pinewood Derby Champion 1971 checking in.

AMA

My opinion is you could try letting the kids build a car more or less the way they want, and not worry about applying all the ‘tricks’ in the book to ‘win’. Ask the 10 year old where *he* thinks you should put the weights. Let him design the shape and apply a cool kid paint job.

Or you could buy a 3-axis cnc machine to mill out the body, polish the axles with diamond dust and coat them with the finest graphite you can find so your kid can learn all about ‘winning’.

I watched a kid one time, open the package, take the block, add the wheels and tape .75 cents on top

And he won 2nd place


The team of 23 Nasa aerospace engineers still took 1st with the little coke bottle glasses kid that smelled like pee

Good Luck to them
Hope they Place high

Put the weight at the very back of the car. In fact, lighten up the front as much as is practical. The higher the center of gravity, the more potential energy, ie, the car ‘falls’ farther = more speed. Physics 101

Bevel inside of wheels so only the inside touches the body of the car. Do the same with the axles - bevel the outside so it doesn’t touch the wheel except at the very inside. Easily done by chucking the nail in a drill and dressing it with a file. While you are at it, polish the axle shafts.

You can narrow the ‘tire’ surfaces but it may get DQ-d depending on the refs. As someone mentioned above, set it up so only one front wheel is on the track. 3 wheels are less friction than four. Make sure the car rolls straight.

I let them draw the design they wanted on the car and then we cut them to theirs specs. They did all the sanding and painting themselves. That's how we ended up with a hard candy purple 77 Buick but I figure it's her car she can do it her way.

I'm in charge of putting the lead weights in so that's why I need tricks in placement and balance etc. I'd heard of the running in 3 wheels trick and I chucked some axles in a drill and tried to polish them down. I honestly think the stock axles without my polishing run smoother. The hot dipped zinc like finish seems smoother and they don't wobble as much as the slightly polished down ones.

I'll look into running the wheels on the inside edges and get some powdered graphite tomorrow. Sorry to bring back painful childhood memories for some of you.

Bb

Drill holes in the back and bottom of the car and melt lead into the cavities. Cover with putty and on race day drill out lead until you make weight.

I use o-rings on over each wheel to cut down on friction

Dyna bore coat?

Interesting video and ideas. I was surprised by how short the length of the track/race was.

Around here they let family members compete in the Derbys also...

We even had adults show up to compete, if you can believe that.... against 6 to 10 yr old boys....

My favorite tho, was a little second grade blonde gal, who was a sister to two boys in the Cub Scout Pack... Single Mom family...

Her daughter took the block of wood out of the box, put the wheels on it, and had her Uncle Plane some wood off of it until it weighed a hair less than 5.0 oz. Then she took it and spray painted it yellow, then with a magic marker drew windows all around the block, and then put School Bus on each side.....

Then it cleaned the clock of all the rest of the boys, and even the Adult males who showed up to compete.

many of us were proud of her.

My older kid watched that, said “Dad, let’s do this” and he won. His “car” looked like a skateboard more than a wedge though.

I ran the table saw, showed him how to drill using the scrap. And he did the rest. We did buy an inexpensive jig for drilling the axle holes and used tungsten for weight. My other boy is going to be doing the same thing this year, and we already have the jig. We will need a few more weights though. This kid is probably good to go on the table saw too, a lot less of a spaz around machinery.

Wheels were right out of the box, axles were polished and graphited. But again, I’d show how on one, kids do the rest.


Oh, and per the video and physics, our weights were as far back as we could get them. Maybe 3/32 between the edge of the weights and the end of the “car” . Again, letting the boy take the lead on how to orient the weights for the rearmost placement that also got the right CG point.

[quote=Seafire]Around here they let family members compete in the Derbys also...

We even had adults show up to compete, if you can believe that.... against 6 to 10 yr old boys....

My favorite tho, was a little second grade blonde gal, who was a sister to two boys in the Cub Scout Pack... Single Mom family...

Her daughter took the block of wood out of the box, put the wheels on it, and had her Uncle Plane some wood off of it until it weighed a hair less than 5.0 oz. Then she took it and spray painted it yellow, then with a magic marker drew windows all around the block, and then put School Bus on each side.....

Then it cleaned the clock of all the rest of the boys, and even the Adult males who showed up to compete.

many of us were proud of her.[/quote

I suggested they do the yellow and black full block and modeled it after my favorite septic pumping service, The Stool Bus! They didn't go for it but there really is a septic pumping company that paints their tanker trucks like school busses and called them the stool bus.

They pretty much wanted to do it their way which I'm ok with but my boy did like me adding the boat tail to his car for reduced drag. I think a lot is going to be about getting the wheels and alignment right but like I told the kids our primary goal is to win but learning something and having fun is good too. Although winning is usually the most fun. I want them to know it's still ok to be competitive despite what the world tells them.

Bb

Or you could do as deflave says and teach them what it is like to be a loser for the rest of their lives and never accomplish anything.

I hope they do well and make wonderful memories.

deflave Is a expert on losers, he has been a loser for his whole life. Rio7

Walked into a discussion among engineers at work about PWD one day... they also pointed out the physics of weight placement in that you get the additional gravitational advantage of however much higher the weight is on the ramp (tilted) vs when the car is horizontal... (back is better)

Reducing rolling resistance by 3 wheels touching makes perfect sense; I'm sure friction is a much greater drag than wind resistance. Caveat is that the car has to run pretty straight to realize this advantage or you're scrubbing the edge of the track all the way down

The biggest advantage in running on three wheels is that it makes alignment easier. Slightly bend one of the front axles then rotate it to adjust the alignment. Get the car tracking absolutely straight. The other front wheel should about the thickness of a playing card off the ground. You'll see otherwise fast cars that bounce off both sides of the track scrubbing off all of their speed.

3 wheels, try to get COG 3/4 to 7/8 from back of the car. Make wheelbase as long as legal, powdered graphite with moly is the easiest route to fast. Oil is faster but much more detailed prep. Lots of good ideas already stated above. Reducing friction and weight placement is key. My boys always tried for a little drift, idea was to hit the rail and stay, not bouncing back and forth. If your front axle is slightly bent it is easy to tune the car for the right amount of drift. Roll on a slight incline (wifes mirror) and shoot for 12 inches in 7-8 feet.
Like others have stated, it is about spending time with your kids, keep them involved. My oldest son was middle of the pack his first year. He wanted to go fast. We did a little research after that and my boys won every race after that

Let the kids work on the car body, you do the wheels. Clean off any burs on the underside of the head and taper the head outward a bit for less drag. Polish up the axles with fine emery cloth. Work dry graphite into the wheels and axles. I used a drill to put some miles on them. My kid really didn't care about the wheels he wanted a cool car body, so he cut and painted and I helped with the wheels/axles. He won locally a couple years running.

My son was into scooby doo when he did his we made the mystery machine.Some how the axles got off kilt gluing them and it would make it half way down the track and stop every time.The tears welled up in his 6 year old eyes defeat 😭bout tore me up but he got the ribbon for the coolest car after the race😉👍he learned a valuable lesson that day as most of his 6 yr old friends walked away without a ribbon.

I built 5 cars one year, two for my kids, one each for the wife and myself, and one for any kid that showed up without one. My kids both won their races, my wife won the adult worker race, and I came in third. You never saw so many angry Baptists in your life, and even the pastor got really snippy about it because he used to be a machinist and thought he knew something

Polished the axles, scuffed the wheels. Set the axels into the grooves, then pushed down so all bore equally on the surface and glued them into place. Took the cars to the Post Office and added stick-on tire weights to bring them up to the limit. Used RemOil on the wheels.

Years later when my wife was working in another church’s school, one of the other teachers asked about how we won. I talked to her husband about it and gave him some RemOil. They won all their races too!

We still have the cars and trophies, and it’s a favorite family story, “How We Kicked Baptist Ass at the Awana Races”.

Old Dad got it right that time.

How's daddy's property lookin' these days?

LOL

You anti-Trump dumb fugk.

I was out with my crossman pellet rifle killing stuff.
Think I made one in cub scouts???
Probably 75 85 % of us in troop 72 grew up to be burn outs in junior high and high school.
It was the mid 70,s to early 80,s after all.
Maybe 50% of us joined the military after high school and became goons with select fire wpns basically.

Weight in the rear makes sense
Polished axles make sense
Running on 3 wheels and tracking right makes sense.
Tapered wheels makes sense.



I would hate to lose to NASA dad and the nerd crew.

About the dumbest GD schit a person could spend their time on.

In 2022, Boy Scouts will teach you two things about being a man or the outdoors:

Jack & Schit.

Kids should all just stay home and play video games......

No wonder I always lost

Depends on the child and the game, but mostly I'd agree.

The Pinewood Derby in 2022 is a monumental waste of time. It's idiotic.

I remember like it was yesterday, I forget what foster family it was, but they were Mormons. Anyhow It was pinewood derby time, my Mormon foster dad said Langford you are competing. I built a car and I took last place couple of days later I was back in good ol state custody.. Nugget

Holy fugk...

Legit can't breathe as I type...

You mother fugker.

If you all thought Nugget story had a good ending and I took first place unfortunately nugget doesn't have that kind of luck.

I worked with the Scouts for about 10. I tell folks I was with the khaki Scouts, and not the rainbow Scouts.

Anyway, there was this kid in the Cubs that came from a one parent family (mom and no dad). He would show up at the derby with a car that looked like it had been hacked out of a 2x4 with a dull hatchet, and painted with scrap paint with his eyes closed. Thing is he won 1st place every year. Every. Single. Year. Nobody could even come close. I don't know if the kid had some kind of secret, or if it was Divine intervention, but he always won with that ugly duckling car.

😁

I worked on cars for a handful of engineers at the plant. Jig the wood blocks up on a mill, drill the axle holes lifting one front one up .005". I'd also machine pockets for the factory weights into the bottom of the car. I made a special shim so that when you pressed the axle into the block the clearance between the wheel and the body was an exact value. We didn't use graphite on the axles, it was some very expensive lube that supposedly comes from NASA.

Sounds like they need a Dad division.

Kids finished middle of the pack. Out of 40 some cars they were 18th and 21st. My 10 year old really wanted to win but didn't and handled it pretty well. They had fun anyways.

I was proud of my kid because the guy said he was going to tell them about a race and they could vote who won. It was leading into a joke. My kid turned to me and said that is crap, you can't vote for who wins its the fastest car that wins. He then said this guy must be a Democrat.

Bb

Good for your kid
sounds like you are raising him right.

That sounds like a lot of fun, I've built them but never raced them as a kid.

They are old enough for you to consider building them a soap box car. Talk about a blast.

Here is one my dad and I built when I was 11. We went a little overboard.

they actually sell polished axle kits (nails) with wheels


We had a scout troop that met at the church I went to as a kid. The neighbor was involved with it, and they had a boy whose dad bailed on the mom, so the neighbor asked me to help the kid out. I was no help at all and in the first race he lost, so another dad that was there - I guess he felt sorry for the boy and my ineptness at pinewood derby in general, pulled me aside and gave me a tube of graphite. We put that on his wheels and his car was greased lightning after that. I think he ended up getting second or third place. I really don't remember but I know he was proud of himself. This was like 1979.

They have one. My older kid competed in this one year. I think he came in fifth or sixth. I built one for my younger son just so he wouldn’t feel left out. He was 4 or 5 at the time. When we got there, they told him he could compete it the adult division. He won it, and I couldn’t believe how mad some of the dads were! I thought I was going to have to fight our way out of that church auditorium.

No doubt that's what your father did, which is why you turned out to be the miserable SOB that you are. I feel sorry for your wife and kids. Really.

Queenie!


You and your boyfriend still trying to conceive?

Nothing says Christianity like a pinewood Derby fight.

No chit! Life has to suck for a guy to get butthurt over something so inconsequential.

laffin’

What do some people not understand about the internet?

A lot of folks are entertained by watching others gobble up what ever "sour apples" they decide to pick and choose to throw out in front of them. While others seem to live in a constant state of belly ache,… but they just keep eatin’ em up!!

I wasn't much of a sculptor.......my pinewood derby cars all looked like something growing on fettermans neck.

Performance and style equally sukked

We did it in Boy Scouts, but I don't remember much of it. I'm taking that to mean I didn't get any prizes.

Sure thing Mr. Can't Post Pictures.

LOL

Whatever you do, don't go outside this weekend.

Neither can make the other one hard.

Talk about unhappiness.

LOL

I guarantee with 148 WC on that car they will loose. You should be glue’n a 7mm 180 gr ELD-M on the front. My boy will be doing that.

I remember seeing my first Pinewood Derby and being turned off by the whole deal.

The most pitiful thing I saw at one of my sons' Pinewood Derby events was when a kid walked up to the table where all the cars were placed after being checked in and asked his father, "which one is mine." -tnscouter

At our church, we had a no rules (except nothing flammable) derby. All I did was epoxy 4 one pound lead ingots to the wood and graphite on the axles. That sob hit the end of the track and rolled all the way to the end of the gym.

I had a Swastika and a German Iron Cross on mine, I kid you not.

I was worried They would finish last and you was going to drop them off at state youth center.. I’m glad they did good. Nugget give you a thumbs up but I have no thumbs.

My mom was dating a guy who built my car for me. He showed up with it in a shoebox on a bed of cotton. My instructions were to lift it out, set it on the track and otherwise not look at it or touch it. Of course I lost, I think I didn’t even bring it home.

About 15 years ago a friends kid was entering the derby, I asked him to get me a kit. He told me they now allowed an adult division. So I whittled me a derby car which was 63 Jag inspired. On race day I still lost but I do have the car sitting on my desk.