Derby Talk

Great idea. Now you have me seriously considering doing one of these. What was the race format? Was it last one standing wins? Do you have some mechanism to open both start gates at the same time or is it just a 1-2-3-Go operation? I have been around 8-11 year old boys for many years and they enjoy ...

Nice work. I had never heard of the phone booth car - now I have.

My saw is a cheapie from Harbor Freight...there's no reason to think that a cut-off switch would be harmful in any way to it, is there? I believe that unless you go with a much lighter gauge wire, and additional switch won't be harmful to the machine. I think a dead-man switch may give a false sens...

Our pack is scheduled to have a cubmobile race in August (after being postponed from June due to inclement weather). I couldn't leave well enough alone thought I would build a pinewood derby sized cubmobile. The first issue I needed to tackle was the size of the car. Pinewood derby cars and cubmobil...

Now I know league racers do this and will use some sort of fin, I dont supposed I would do this but just leave the area alone. Having something there is useful depending on the stop section of the track. I left the non-DFW area empty on one car I built. I found that when it hit the stop section of ...

I could not figure out how to do a "late add" without totally cancelling out my schedule and starting over.. I'm sure this has been discussed before.. unfortunately, the school's guest wifi blocked derbytalk.com.. maybe they thought it was dirtytalk.com or something.. Thus, I couldn't loo...

That's a lot of electronics on a car. It must be bigger on the inside.

:welcome: How difficult is the initial setup with the BestTrack going to be? I suggest allowing at least 3 hours for the initial setup of just the track. Allow more time to get the timer installed and working as well as time to get familiar with GPRM. A friendly tip that you don't see published much...

You may want to read through this thread that has some good suggestions. The thread contains some debate about whether cars should even be stored, which likely doesn't apply to your current situation.

I wouldn't want it to get too complicated (dealing in all 3 dimensions). I imagine that most would be satisfied with just 2 dimensions, perhaps even 1. Knowing the balance point fore and aft would be most helpful. Second, in my opinion, would be left to right and lastly the vertical. I know this fe...

Another feature that may be useful would be a center of gravity calculator. I envision such a calculator being used when planning the build of a car. Perhaps require inputs of block weight, wheelbase, # wheels, weight of wheels, ballast material (e.g. 1/4" tungsten cubes, 3/8" lead rod), b...

I would like to see a way to record a variety of variables for a given car. I suppose you could build in a list of what may be considered standard variables (e.g. weight, wheelbase, lubricant, Center of mass/gravity, inches of drift). Being able to identify some custom variables would be nice for th...

I think those are great. I can't wait to see the final product.

One possible solution is to create a group called Wolf/Tiger then have a subgroup for each den. That way they will race together but you can still separate the wolf from the tigers. I don't know that you can have the dens in their own groups and still race against scouts from other dens.

I have seen two different was of doing this. The first is a scout's or people's choice award where the competitors and/or spectators vote on the one they like the best. That can become a popularity contest in moderate to small sized groups. Another option is to have a judge's choice award where an i...