Albany Pack 3 Pinewood Derby

This year’s Pinewood Derby was nearly 3 hours of racing and photo-shooting fun. It’s may be the funnest thing we do all year. Everyone gets into it, parents, siblings and scouts.

This time around, Theo was committed to making a green sparkly lizard for some reason. He helped design the shape, picked out the colors and sparkles, and the googly eyes. He didn’t want to really do much of the actual physical work. I can’t blame him, I didn’t either. So, I made him at least start each of the tasks, except for the cutting on the band saw! Letting him play with that didn’t seem like a real good idea. But he worked at least a little on the rasping and sanding and painting and gluing.

Last year, Theo got the award for Coolest Car. He was the only one to affix legos and Clone Troopers to his car. This year there were several with lego parts or lego figures attached. This year he came up short, despite actually doing much better in the race. In three heats he went 2-1-2. Then in his semi-final race, he came in second. But they only took the first-place cars for a four-car final race. It was largely dominated by the Bear den. They must have some engineering secrets over there.

While there has been a sibling category so that all the kids can get into the fun, year was the first time that we’ve had a parents category. There were no weight or other rules limiting what one could do with the car for the parents. So, of course someone took the nuclear option. Or at least the CO2 option, as you can see below.