For my son, Noah’s last pinewood car (as a Cub Scout) he decided to build one of his favorite cars ever, KITT. The Knight Industries Two Thousand (the original) was the co-star of the Knight Rider series from 1982 to 1986 with David Hasselhoff.
Last year at the World of Wheels, (a traveling car show, that helps some of us mid-westerners to know that there is something to look forward to after all of the snow) they had the original KITT and the new KITT (to help the new show’s ratings). We got our picture taken with the original KITT and the new KITT
(I didn’t lose the top of my head, but I did lose $8 for the picture). Noah took a lot of pictures with his digital camera of KITT, when we returned home he needed to print out all of the pictures. I gave him a photo album and he was up in his room typing notes and drawing pictures (yes, he does own a typewriter).
Noah’s mother purchased the DVD set of first season a couple of years ago and Noah can’t stop watching the series. He thinks the computer controlled car is one of the coolest things he has ever seen. When he watches the episodes he often has to stop so he can document what all of the switches in the car control (he has figured that they move the buttons for different episodes). Here is one of the drawings from the book:
The first part of building is making a plan for the car, Noah plan:
Dad plan:
And then the build starts:
Cutting that center portion from the body saved 1.07 oz. That seems to be significant loss.
This year was the first year we did not have arguments of how much sanding was enough, he would bring me the car and I would show him what needed more sanding and he would go back and sand some more.
While I was looking up pictures of KITT to use to draw the plans from, I found a company that makes a KITT scanner for the front of the 1:18 scale cars. I figured with a little adaptation we may possibly be able to use this on a pinewood derby car. I brought the idea up to Noah, and showed him their website Knightlight and he thought it would work too.
So we ordered the board without LEDs as I was planning to use rectangular, 2.5 x 5mm, LEDs on our scanner (to reduce its width). It took a while to get here from the UK.
We used epoxy to attach the LEDs together for the scanner and then we set out to cut the hole to mount the LED assembly.
note the use of a Kleenex to cover up his 1:18 scale KITT while we were sanding:
I informed Noah while we were purchasing the scanner that he would need to solder the connections from the LEDs to the board, and he did a really good job for his first time at soldering.
Then we made a metal cover for the scanner and used bondo to hold it in place:
The electronics are meant to be powered by a 9V battery. A 9V battery weighs 1.65 oz., this was way too much, so we looked into some button batteries. Button batteries did not have the capacity to power the scanner for long (in my estimation). We eventually came up with a 12V garage door opener battery the weight of that battery was .28oz. We had to make our own custom battery holder:
We had originally made a steel bottom for the car. The steel bottom (made from a piece of thin, galvanized, roof flashing) made it hard to get the car to 4.8oz. before paint. We ended up removing more wood weight and while we were removing wood weight I got the dremel caught around the wires going to the scanner. Nothing was damaged (some of the insulation was nicked) and all of the LEDs continued to work. We eventually made an aluminum bottom cover for the car saving .34 oz. Then it was off to the paint booth for some primer:
After we sanded out the primer we added panel lines into the primered surface. Then we applied paint.
We always seem to have some trouble with the paint, I forgot to wipe the car down after cutting the panel lines into the primer. So on both sides we have fish eyes in the paint (maybe we will try to fix these later). Next we applied the decals…
We then started the wheel and axle prep. Noah polished the axles and the wheel bores and lightly sanded the wheel tread. We painted the wheels silver… We are making a set of the black hubcaps for the car but we cannot have anything covering the wheels for inspection, so they will be removable, and not used while racing.
This year Noah decided we would be the FLAG racing team, so we needed to come up with a logo:
Here are some pictures from the race:
It seems that KITT is indeed fast it took second in the Webelo II group (out of 7 boys), 4th in the Pack (29 cars). Noah also received a design award for “Coolest Looking Car”.
But that is not the only thing we made for this years derby. Stay tuned for more…
restored pictures 1/4/17
