Our winning car

[Whistler]

Thanks to Randy's help with the posting, and everyone elses informative posts, we were able to put this one together. Did very well in both speed and creativity competition, garnering first in pack for each. As you can see my son got a real workout with the coping saw and sandpaper to make this one.

[Stan Pope]

That's a real beauty! Contratulations! (even though it has enough wood for two cars ... and a sailboat! )

[Whistler]

Actually Stan the side rails had to get hollowed out since we used 6 tungsten cylinders as a structural element (they also support the pod) as well as weights and the car came up a little heavy after painting. The tungsten is really tough to cut down once in place, so we used the milling attachment on the unimat to hollow out the side rails from below. There is a whole lot less wood there than it looks like there is. My son views the slots as "jet pack boosters".

Thanks for the positive review. The car was very fast setting a new pack record for this track (in fact the average speed the car had for all its runs was faster than the previous track record). We got pretty lucky with alignment I think (though the PinePro tool was a godsend for that).

[terryep]

That's no wedge!

Terry

[RACER X]

That car is KILLER!!!

It looks like something Racer X himself should drive.

[MathGuy]

That car is something that I wanted to do at some point. The covered wheels aspect should have really helped the aerodynamic drag. (most cars, the open rolling wheels are the source of the greatest amount of drag)

Now since it was done, I have no reason to do it.

You guys did awesome.

[campngolf]

Very cool lookng car. I'm jealous.

What did you make your "bumper" out of.

What did you do to make the silver stripes? It doesn't look like paint.

Sorry for the ignorant questions, but my son and I are starting our first cars and I want to give it our best effort. Thanks.

[Whistler]

We're pretty proud of the car also, though I think we got lucky with the alignment, minimal shimming this year. Thanks for all the positive feedback. This is our third PWD and the cars have gotten more elaborate each year. The first car was a slightly modified wedge that performed pretty well (got to the finals) but lack of skill in alignment and not knowing to "run in" the graphite made a serious difference in performance. Following year we did a "jet car" which was a real bear to weight and gave my son a workout on the coping saw big time. This years car you see pictured. I need to take Stan's advice (as usual) and try to redirect him to simpler designs again I think.

Car striping was done with foil tape (we used X-acto sliced stripes of aluminum duct tape, but you can purchase foil tape at Michaels if you are in a crush. The duct tape is much cheaper). The front foil was a thin wire coathanger cut and bent to shape, with a piece of leftover plastic from the fin for a space derby rocket glued to it. You could use almost anything (we started with hard balsa, but the plastic was lighter and thinner).

I'm sure the Racer X car design was in the back of my son's mind when he came up with the idea (though he said much of his inspiration was from speedboats). We are both Anime' fans and certainly the yellow color echos the Speedracer series.

He had so much fun with this one I'm planning on making one of my own. It will have full wheel shrouding, which I think was a major factor in the aerodynamics here.

[Sssnake]

For making stripes and appliques that look like chrome, I use trim brite chrome. Its about $4.00 a roll and you can do alot of cars out of a roll. To see the results, see my Flex wedge or Blue and Gold pics.