Pinewood Derby

We built and raced a Pinewood Derby car! See us build it from start to finish.
/ Josh Larson / personalfamilyscouting

Our local Cub Scout pack had a Pinewood Derby over the weekend!

I did Pinewood Derby when I was a Cub Scout, too, so it was fun participating with my own son.

Over the winter break, we went up to my parents’ house. My dad took us out to his shop where we started whittling away the block you get in the Pinewood Derby kit.

We used the table saw in the loft to take the biggest chunks out…

…and then smaller hand tools to make smaller cuts.

Then the car sat in a box for a few weeks.

The week of the race, we picked it back up and started grinding away some of the rough edges in our (cold!) garage:

My dad had loaned us a couple grinder bits for our drill as well as a power sander.

This is the ground and sanded car.

Painting time! This was the perfect task for a six-year-old and his onlooking younger brother.

Barrett added some yellow lightning bolts with an acrylic marker.

Pinewood Derby cars are allowed to be up to 5 ounces. In just the wood form, it was about 2.5 ounces. We drilled a couple holes and added some nuts and bolts to weigh it down.

After the bolts were in, it was 4.92 ounces… but taking it into the weigh-in the night before, they clocked it at a precise 5.0 ounces! 😅

The design competition was fierce. The pack had four categories:

  • Electronics

  • Sports

  • Patriotic/Scouting

  • Food

Some personal favorites:

  • Minecraft

  • S’more

  • Pineapple

  • Snowboarder with 3D printed boots

  • A derby racetrack on top of a derby car itself

Derby day!

They did heats based on dens aka age groups.

The track was giant with eight lanes, so each car got to race eight times. They had a fancy setup with some sort of radar to detect whose car finished first, down to the ten-thousandth of a second!

Barrett’s car finished in 4th place pretty consistently. He didn’t advance to the final round, but we had fun anyway!

Believe