After I responded with a very confused, "???," he replied with two photos:
Apparently when the small hand saw he was using didn't work (it turned out he'd purchased one intended to cut plastic, not wood), he took his electric drill to it. Obviously that didn't help.
Ah. The pinewood derby car. After a sigh of relief on my end that he wasn't talking about taking power tools to our actual car, followed quickly by a few good laughs with my mom and sister, I spoke on the phone with my very disheartened husband. A pinewood derby car, it turns out, was a lot harder to construct than he'd been led to believe by his power tool-owning father in his youth.
But there was still time to fix it. With the purchase of a few new tools, and the compromise of a different design than originally intended, he and the boys were able to salvage that block of pine. It wasn't the prettiest thing on four wheels, but it had improved a great deal since its humiliating beginning.
The day before the race, they applied graphite to the wheels and attached them to the car.
Matthew wasn't a big fan of how loud the drill was.
The finished car. The numbers represent the ages of the boys.
Yesterday was the big race. Partly because we don't have many cub scout-aged boys, and partly because the dads in the ward wanted to relive their childhood glory days, this Pinewood Derby was an activity for the entire ward, with both a rule-abiding regulation division and an "ultimate" anything-goes division. This was the first Pinewood Derby our ward has sponsored in recent memory; we had to borrow the track from a neighboring ward. Everyone was excited, and about 20 cars were entered. Ours, it turned out, was a formidable contender; the only races we lost were to the clear winner.
Photo credit: Adam Grimshaw
Things got a little wild in the "ultimate" division. I don't have any pictures, but the contestants included one with a solar powered propeller, one weighted down with a brick, one with a mouse-trap contraption that prevented competitors from passing, and, my favorite, which was also that division's winner, the Oscar Meyer wiener-mobile.
The whole event was fun -- so much so, perhaps, that Blake may have momentarily forgotten that, with four little boys, he has at least 16 more cars to build looming in his future. But he's already planning next year's design (while simultaneously dreaming of owning a power sander), and he's determined to make each one a little better than the last.
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