Life at the Academy

Since Buster is moving into Boy Scouts next month, last weekends Pinewood Derby was his last one.  From his first year as a Tiger Cub, the derby has been a big deal at our house.  Buster has designed the car every year, carefully choosing paint colors, and helping with every cosmetic detail.  The first year, that was about all he did with regards to it.  The next year, he did a little more of the work and started to get interested in what was necessary to make a fast car.  He remembered those little details and applied them the following year, taking over more and more on the entire car building process.  He spent time on the internet researching designs and tips that might make his car go faster.  Each year, he won a trophy for his rank and most years overall for the pack.  This year, his heart wasn’t quite in it – he already had all those trophies and he was looking forward to moving on to Boy Scouts.  Boxman decided that he was going to make the fastest car ever run on our track just for fun and started it way ahead of time.  Three weeks before the derby, Boxman was trying to get Buster to work on his car.  He wasn’t interested.  Two weeks to go and he had figured out the design in his head but had no interest in actually starting to build the car.  Boxman’s car was looking pretty good.  At one week before, Boxman was just sure that Buster wasn’t going to be doing a car this year or at best would be racing a block of wood.  But alas, he couldn’t let his last opportunity to race pass by without having a car in it.  He drew his design on the wood and Boxman helped him hollow it out with the power tools.  Buster sanded it.  He was starting to get into it all and the next thing we knew, he was once again on the internet trying to figure out what he needed to do to make it into a fast car.  Things progressed with Buster doing more of the work on it himself than in past years.  I overheard him telling Boxman exactly what he needed him to help him with.  It was a beautiful thing.  Now despite trying to make it fast, his main concern was that it was a cool car.  It was definitely more *his* car than previous years. In the meantime, Doodles decided on Thursday night that she wanted to make a car for the siblings race on that Saturday. Boxman thought it would be close to impossible to get a car done that quickly but he would do what he could to help her. Of course he was still very focused on finishing up his ultimate car before the race.

For the few weeks before the race, this is what my kitchen looked like….

I was glad to have it cleaned up after the big race day.

So the day of the race arrived too quickly for some, but the cars were done for the most part.  They had to fine tune the weights on them after weighing them in for the race.

This is Buster’s car.  I can’t find pictures handy of the other two cars.

So, the first heat had Buster’s car skipping the track (due to too much of the weight being too far back in the car).  Rather than risk getting disqualified, they started racing his car backwards.  Not a good way to go with all that weight that was so far back in the car now so far forwards.  He still ended up beating about a third of the cars.  And best of all, he had fun and was proud of himself for making that car so much on his own – in less than a week.  Not winning another trophy to add to his collection didn’t seem to matter much to him.

And what about those other two cars? Boxman, who spent weeks working on his very cool car, didn’t do so well. His car had a similar problem with the weights too far back. Doodle’s car, which had the fewest man hours invested in it and was whipped together in 1 day, was not only the fastest of our 3 cars, but also was faster than the car that won for the pack. I think a lesson was learned by Boxman….