Pine-Wood Derby Race!

So, besides getting shot two saturdays ago, I also raced two cars in my ward's pine-wood derby race. I competed in two of the four brackets: Traditional rules, and Anything Goes. It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed working on my car. Below are some pictures that display the process I took to make my anything goes car (Flash). On the day of the race they weighed it at 498 grams. the traditional cars can only weigh 142 grams. Needless to say, I added a lot of lead.

For the Traditional rules bracket, I just grabbed one of my cars that I have had since Boy Scouts and reapplied graphite powder and polished the axels.

The funny part about this is that I won both races. No one had built an Anything goes car, so I won by default and I'm ok with that. My other car competed with about 10-12 other cars and managed to win. I was shocked. I won a huge bag of Skittles and a $20 gift card to Apple-bees. I'm glad I decided to do it.

I hollowed out the middle of the car and left the walls up for support and to hold the lead in.

This is just to show how much lead I used. There are 28 pieces of lead sitting in there.

I borrowed a torch and held each piece of lead with my needle-nose pliers while dripping the lead in as evenly as I could.

This is just after I finished melting it. It's burnt around the edges because not all of the pieces that fell in were below the height of the walls. I had to melt it even more so that there wouldn't be pieces sticking up.

After it cooled I filled it in with wall putty and let it dry to I could sand it down nice and smooth.

These are the two cars. I painted Flash red and tried to put a yellow lightning bolt on the front. Trying to do that reminded my why I'm not an artist. It looked like I spilled mustard on the car.

Here he is.... he's a beauty!!