Pinewood Derby, Build it or Buy it?

Did you build a pinewood derby car when you were in the Cub Scouts?

I can remember building one that was splotchy red and black. I carved it with my own little 8 year old hands. I do not remember any grown ups helping with its construction, other than providing me with the sharp tools to carve with and the paint to paint with.

Sharp tools in 8 year old hands, I wonder if that is good parenting or not? It probably helped to clear out the gene pool in some instances.

The car might have had stripes or flames or some other similar decoration. I am sure it was an outstanding piece of 8 year old craftsmanship and engineering.

I know that it won the coveted oil can award. At the time I did not know what that meant. I think I do now. It meant it was butt ugly, it was slow, and they tried to give everyone at least one trophy. Thanks for participating. Here is your cheap little plastic trophy. Hope your feelings did not get hurt. Heck no, thanks a million for telling me that my car is not just ugly, it is the ugliest thing you have ever seen, and its ugliness needs a trophy to show the world just how ugly it is.

When I was 8 years old, I had less skill in the woodworking arts than I do now. My woodworking abilities at this moment consist of taking a pocketknife, and whittling a stick. I learned how to do this during my many years in the Boy Scouts. I also learned an off color joke during those years. (Do you know when a Cub Scout becomes a Boy Scout? When he eats his first Brownie. Try the veal, I will be here all week.)

While participating in my first official Boy Scout hike / campout, I took out a hatchet. I was going to chop some wood for a fire. Why we thought we needed a fire at night in Arizona, I am not sure. Probably something to do with S'mores.

I set down a piece of wood, and stepped on it with my foot to stabilize it. I am sure this made perfect sense in the mind of an 11 year old city boy. With a mighty swing of the hatchet, I chopped into my shoe and my big toe. I must have been a fairly wimpy child, for although the mighty swing of the hatchet penetrated through my shoe, and my sock, and part of my big toe nail, it did not go deep enough into the toe to require much in the way of first aid. Explain again why we had such easy access to the sharp implements of destruction? Oh yeah, the gene pool. We should do more of that with our children, they are too soft these days with all the video games and the cell phones and whatnot. They need more knives and hatchets. The minor injury did get me out of more hiking, so that was a plus. Why leaders would allow kids to play with hatchets is a story for another day. I cannot imagine lawsuit happy parents to even allow a kid today to touch a hatchet, but what do I know.

These same leaders waited for us to grow a few years, then took us on a Boy Scout trip to Mexico. We were older, but not much wiser. We bought some very cheap bottle rockets from some vendors who happened to be selling them on the beach. They would come along shouting 'Big Boom'. We talked one kid into making the initial purchase to test out the claim. He proceeded to light it, and holy cow, the vendor certainly could claim truth in advertising. Big Boom indeed. We were all believers, and most of our spare cash went toward buying the Big Boom's for the rest of that week.

We were camping and sleeping on the beach. We did not shower. We were stinky Boy Scouts. We were in Mexico. We had leaders that had taken the week off of work, and they were burning up their vacation time from work to take us down to Mexico. They were interested in going deep sea fishing, and as long as we were not killing anyone, they were not very interested in the details of how we entertained ourselves.

We found that we were not too far from town, and some of the guys went for a walk during the day and returned with booze and cigarettes. Everyone was happy. The leaders were happy since they were out fishing and eating fresh seafood and enjoying a week away from their families. The kids were happy since they were also eating fresh seafood and blowing things up and trying to make any kind of headway with the neighboring hordes of girls that were also camping on the beach.

I am sure that blowing up bottle rockets is the first method that teenagers should use to attract women. It is odd how little luck we had with that approach, especially compared to the guys that had been taking showers and had access to ATV's and Sand Rails.

I am not sure which of the kids decided that shooting the rockets into the air was not nearly as much fun as shooting the rockets down the beach toward other people. All I know is, alcohol plus young Boy Scouts plus Big Boom bottle rockets equals disaster. It is an equation that has been proven time and time again in all of the advanced math classes that I ever attended.

The kids that went to town and purchased cigarettes had a huge advantage. Luckily for me I happened to be on their end of the beach that fateful night.

They would light a cigarette, and use that brightly lit end to light the fuses of their rockets. They might be starting down the path toward lung cancer and bad breath, but while their adversaries at the other end of the beach struggled with matches and lighters in the wind, the cigarette wielding hooligans were firing rockets with impunity. Nothing could stop them.

Until they ran out of rockets.

Nobody shot their eye out that night. Nobody was killed. To this day I am not sure why a bunch of drunk kids shooting rockets up and down the beach at each other was not ever stopped or questioned by the adults. There were adult Boy Scout leaders, and there were adults that had no connection to the group, but you would think that one of them might have thought that no good could come of this.

Looking back, maybe that is just what you do when you sleep on a beach in Mexico. You let the kids drink and shoot rockets up and down the beach at each other and hope nobody gets hurt. I am sure the medical facilities in the area would have been state of the art affairs where we would have gotten all the best possible care.

The best moment was driving back across the border. This was all very pre 9/11, and coming back the lazy officer asked us if we were bringing back any contraband. If they would have torn into that truck they would have found illegal fireworks and alcohol and who knows what all was being taken into the States. We all looked blandly at the officer and said no sir, we do not have anything in the truck. He saw the scout uniforms and must have believed us as he let us cross without checking us out.

This all brings me back to the pinewood derby. I am now peripherally involved as my own Cub Scout is soon going to be building a car. Do I let him build one himself, and face the oil can award? Or do I buy one of the fancy kits that you can find online? Did you know that you can buy wheels that have been turned on a lathe and precision engineered to reduce friction and drag? You can buy tungsten weights as they have more mass in a smaller package and will help your car speed down the track. You need to be sure to lubricate your wheels properly and prepare you axles. These are all things I did not know two days ago.

You can buy a book for $5.95 that contains 30 tips and tricks written by an engineer and a physicist. You can sink a ton of money into a car and try to beat the other kids. I had no idea that this was what I was up against. I just carved up a car and painted it and did the best I could. Do I want to subject my own kid to losing all the races and having an ugly home made car when I could have bought him a prefabricated Batmobile or Formula One racer? Who doesn't want to win all the races and bring home first prize? Is it really winning if I buy the thing from the internet? Is there going to be much pride in a car that you did not build, if you win first place? Will the kids that could not afford to buy a car but made a really nice one feel upset that the other kid went out and bought the wins and the trophies?

I wonder if the dude that invented the pinewood derby had any idea that it would come to this.