Earlier this morning, we wrapped up the 2009 Cub Scout pinewood derby. This was Andrew’s first year, and he was terribly excited. Last night, we did the track set-up and unofficial weigh-in/shakedown, which really caught his attention. While he was interested in building the car previously, he had little idea of what to expect. After last night’s informal event, however, he was, as they say, eager to begin; as in up at 5:30am this morning asking if it was time to race yet eager.

Last night’s event also managed to convince me to put a car together, for entry in the “anything goes” Outlaw class; if it fits on the track, it can run. However, while I did have a kit available, I had rather little time to actually put something together. I managed something anyway, as you’ll see below.

In any case, Andrew and I both did reasonably well, the boy coming in fourth in his group, and me pulling a respectable sixth against cars which violated the official rules much more flagrantly than mine did. A post-race shot of the cars may be found below:

Andrew’s as you can probably tell, is the nice green one on the right; we were aiming for a vague 60s muscle car feeling, hence the SS tripes; Andrew calls it half mustang, half camaro; which is about right. He came up with the design, and did quite a lot of the sanding and painting. I helped out with the actual carving and the finer detail work. We started it over Christmas break, and kept at the painting for weeks afterwards as time permitted. We feel good about it.

Mine, as you can see, took considerably less effort; all told, I built it in about 15 minutes, and most of that was digging out the hammer and nails. Plain uncarved block, a bunch of lead weights nailed on, a sharpie, and a sticker from jinx.com I had lying around. I give you…“The Procrastinator”.

There are, of course, several other photos for your perusal over in the scout stuff album in the photo gallery, if you are interested.