Welcome Race Fans!

Our Pine Wood Derby was this last week.
So of course, the making of the pine wood derby car was put off until the very last minute! Lucky for me, I only have one cub scout this year!

As I labored over this car I couldn't help but to think to myself
{and a little out loud!},
"Why in the heck is it my job to make the stupid pine wood derby car? I thought this was suppose to be a father/son project!

Yes! I get that I'm the creative crafty one in the relationship! But this is a power tools job and I'm not so much of the power tools type! But I must admit by the time I was finished, I was happy with the result!

Carsten wanted a Double Decker Bus this year.
And so a Double Decker he got!

Hollowing out a Double Decker bus isn't an easy task to do! I was working on this thing right up until I was about 30 minutes late going to the church to set up! I hope that all the other scout leaders understood... but there was NO WAY I was going to give up and NOT have Carsten race this thing! We had to make weight! I had put way too many hours into this thing to just give up! I learned a thing or two along the way and finally I did it! 5.0 oz.! We were good to go!

After a short Pack Meeting we all met in the gym for the Pine Wood Derby. We had a guy come and run the whole thing. He sat the boys down and explained to them how it was all going to work. They were all so excited!

Carsten's Double Decker did pretty good! It did a lot better than I was expecting! He won some and lost some and had a blast doing it!

He seemed pretty happy with his car and how it was all panning out!

The Double Decker definitely looked cool!
All the Cub Scouts couldn't hardly keep their hands off it! Every time we turned around someone was checking it out! And trust me, I was a little worried weather the wheels were going to even stay in! I couldn't get the Super Glue opened and so the wheels didn't get the Super Glue bath I was hoping for! In fact, they didn't get any kind of glue at all!

Every year I've done one of these Pine Wood Derby's I've learned what to do differently the next year.
Last year I learned that this year I was only going to let the boys put graphite on their car once at the start of the race and then they were to leave it alone!
This year I learned that next year I'm not going to allow the boys to touch any other boys car until the entire race is finished!
Eventually I'm going to get it right! Or at least get it functioning so that none of the Dads get upset with how it all went down! And then... And then they will release me!

Overall though I thought this years derby went great!

Carsten came in 7th place and he was thrilled with that! He probably would have come in 6th if David and I hadn't asked him to run his car backwards one round just to make sure backwards wasn't faster than forward. It turned out that backwards wasn't only slow... It was brutally slow! Sorry Carsten, our bad!

So let me think... Carsten has one more pine wood derby left and then Talan will have three! 8 down, 4 to go! I'm 2/3rds finished!