S1 wanted to make a racecar that looked like one of his Hot Wheels, so he picked out a Porsche (I tried to convince him to do a yellow Mustang, but no luck) and we went to work on the design. Here is S1, his Hot Wheels car, and his wooden block (note the pre-carved channels for the axles). We traced the block onto a sheet of paper, divided the area into thirds of the hood, cab, and trunk, and mapped the car silhouette onto the block. If the axle grroves hadn't been etched already, I could have removed part of the block for better proportions; in the end, it looked more like my old Dodge Diplomat with a spoiler than a Porsche. I wanted to make a visual record of his project for homeschooling, so here's the first shot of him and his work. It reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin keeps messing up his face just as his dad takes the picture. S1 would do okay right up to the second I pushed the capture button and then, well, see below... it took a lot of work to get even these.
Anyway, our car did very poorly - 5th place in four heats and 4th in two (we had one extra race just for the wolf scouts). S1 was very disappointed, but I told him that my cars never did any better. Of course, that means that the common denominator in all our losses is me... I know that I had some trouble with the wheels on S1's car. I didn't get them balanced, either in height or angle, so I'm afraid the car was veering to the edge of its lane and scraping on the bumpers. Whenever I tried to fix the wheels the bottom of the wood would splinter more, so I jsut had to leave it be. Well, live and learn. One scout came in 1st for every race he was in, and last year's winner lost all his races, so sometimes you win and sometimes you don't.