We had the Pinewood Derby Unleashed race on Saturday with much fun amid all of the carnage of the souped up extra fast cars! Wheels were cracked, axles were bent – then straightened with a vice and pliers, and one car destroyed itself when its ultra powerful ducted fan sucked up some of the t shirts we were using at the end to stop the cars. One of the cars was actually just a solid lead block weighing about seven pounds! We made him go last since we were sure it was going to break the track somehow. It’s a good thing we did because it did actually put a big crack in the wooden track piece where it bounced up and landed on its side! We tracked the times from the start gate to the sensors placed at the end of the track down to the 10,000th of a second. We had some cars that were so evenly matched that it actually mattered! We gave out awards for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd fastest time, overall fastest, overall slowest (that one crawling down the track with a geared electric motor taking it 50 seconds to reach the end), most artistic, best engineered, and even one for the ugliest car (sometimes the ugliest is also the fastest). There was lots of fun and everyone agreed that we should do this event more often at least annually.
Here’s a whole album of photos and video from the build days and race day:
https://goo.gl/photos/bDCiwzpgohzP6L1Y6
Here’s another blog post with photos and videos from one of our members, Carl Jones:
http://www.carlhjones.com/2016/20160220.html#a1