[dekhn]

Heh... at "build day" only the son of the person with the tools was allowed to use any of them. I ended up building a real clunker and felt terrible for years when it lost every race to better-engineered systems. I didn't get any real parental help.

This time around (by which I mean, my son was in cub scouts and doing the derby) I helped my son by showing him some basics of woodworking and how to make something that looked right and rolled properly, but beyond that it was all him. He didn't win any races, but wasn't bummed about it at all.

Following that, I bought a bunch of pine blanks, read a few papers on how to make faster cars (those nail axles are REALLY DUMB), bought Fusion 360, designed a car, and flip-milled it on my personal CNC, over a period of a year (it's never raced). it amuses me to no end that imposter syndrome and OCD drove me to be a well-compensated software engineer with enough free time to build his own pinewood derby racecar in his own time on his own terms.

[Damogran6]

I was cubmaster for 3 years and felt a little bad that my two boys didn’t get near the attention the other kids got…til the last year I helped them with weight distribution, lubrication and axle alignment. The Wife and I ran in Outlaw and had the family been eligible would have taken 4 of the top 7 times. (I think the boys got 2nd and 4th)

I’m looking at 6 of the cars now, I really should mount them in a display or something.

One of the boys is learning chassis fab and welding and the other is learning Industrial Design…so I guess it was a good experience.