Pinewood Derby

Last Saturday was the Cub Scouts' annual Pinewood Derby. This is one of the biggest events of the year, and the boys all really enjoyed it.

Basically, you start with a block of wood that looks like this:


Then you come up with a design and go to town! The sky is the limit and the only restrictions are weight (no more than 5 oz.) and length (not a clue, but I know they were measuring very carefully at check-in!).

Jackson envisioned a super cool race car, and after some fancy work with a jigsaw (they brought in some big ones and experienced dads to help), some awesome red paint and fiery decals, his finished product looked like this:


They run 6 cars at a time down the incredibly high-tech track you can just barely see the boys looking at in the next picture. Each car has its own lane and a computer (somehow) tracks the order in which they pass the finish line. They ended up running 13 heats.


Now, Jackson's car, though it looked super cool, had some design flaws with the wheels (one of them didn't line up quite right) so it was not terribly fast. In fact, it came in last in every heat.

But happily, Jackson still got a medal. Want to guess what it was for?


It was a really fun day, and Jackson is already thinking ahead to his design for next year! :)