Derby Talk

Awesome!!!! Mine was totally low budget (flat bed and squared off "Mack" look with a couple of straws for exhaust). But, it won the big trophy. I lifted every axle I could. Nice work on yours.

Tough call but for a rough track, I'd go with 4 inches in 4 feet. That works well with our rough aluminum (old Challenger) track.

Good luck! Let us know the results. Sounds like the car is in good shape.

The "clinker" in this is the pattern of run times as the cars accumulate heats. Some degrade more rapidly than others, and the cars with "staying power" will tend to do better if there are finals than if their prelim times are compared. That seems to be what happens with my son'...

We like to run the ranks through first, and then advance the fastest from each to the Grand Finals. Is there anything different about the times you collect during the Grand Finals? Does each car race more times than in the qualifying races? Do you combine the times from the qualifying races with th...

We like 2.5 in the rears and 2.5 in the front. If you want to be conservative, go 1.5 on both, put it on the alignment board, and see where the wheels ride and if you can get enough drift with 1.5 on the front. If it doesn't work, go with 2.5. Easier to increase to 2.5 than go back to 1.5.

I have tried both ways and highly recommend bending the axles. Back in the olden days, before the Pro Rail Rider tool, WarpSpeed used to place the axle in the Pro-Axle press in a vise with an old wheel in it (not tight to the Press, about .03 away) and push on the wheel to bend the axle slightly. It...

We do all of our bore prep, then alignment, then a final graphite with wheels on and break-in. Our break-in is to run the car on a flat, clean surface for about 60 feet (two feet at a time!). We put a little pressure on the rear wheels and DFW to simulate a little extra pressure that race conditions...

Our Pack runs timed races with the lane rotation method. Average time with slowest tossed out determines winners. I know that Perfect-N is more exciting for the boys since they don't race against the same ones each time. We like to run the ranks through first, and then advance the fastest from each ...

Thanks Randy. I will sheepishly admit that part of our challenge was realizing we needed to "end the race" for The Judge timer before RaceReplay would pop up.

Next time, go and pick up his son's car and check it out.

In our Pack, we keep the cars pretty far away from where the parents and Scouts usually are. Sorry it happened to you and your son.

I suspect Randy can answer this best. We did our Pinewood Derby this past weekend and used RaceReplay for the first time. It was awesome--thank you very much. However, we used a USB webcam and the pic wasn't great. I have a firewire connection on my computer but couldn't locate a videocam with firew...

We successfully got Race Replay working this past Saturday for our Derby and it was absolutely a crowd pleaser! The video popped up after the race finished, played a couple of times in slow motion. The kids (and adults) absolutely loved it. We had a so-so USB webcam and it wasn't great but it made i...

No pics or much detail at the moment but just wanted to state that my son won the Webelos I races and went on to capture the Pack Grand Finals for the 4th year in a row. In previous years, it was't very close. This year, how about 0.0026s average time between first and second place? Not bad since he...

Much easier to find a 3/32 (.09375) reamer than a #40 (.098) reamer.