We had 55 cars to build and a preset craft budget to work with and we just couldn't find plastic wheels cheap enough for our budget (cheapest we could find was just over $1 a set) so we had to go with wooden wheels again ( about $.30 a set). The wheels were 1.25" tall, 3/8" wide and had a 1/4" center hole which presented an interesting problem for axle selection. The kids only had about three hours during the week to work on their cars before the race on Friday, so we had to provide them with precut bodies. The guy in charge of the project decided on pick-up trucks for this year so we ripped 2x4s in half, cut out 55 truck bodies and painted them all gloss white so the kids could color them with markers and do the final assembly.
I got creative with the axle solution and chose to sleeve the wheels with sections of drinking straws and then use three small craft beads in each straw section as bushings to be able to use sheetrock nails as axles. I would have preferred nails without ridges, but these were all I could find with the right combination of small shank size to fit throught the beads and a head big enough to not fit throught the center hole of the wheel. It wasn't ideal, but it worked out ok.
I also whipped up a trophy from scrap wood and stuck one of the surplus wheels on the top. We used a borrowed 49' Besttrack and Corey Young's ppn speadsheet to keep track of the results. We ran a total of 63 heats in an hour (including a 4 way run off for 4th place and a top 4 run off to determine the winner). It all went very well and I'm already working on wheel/axle improvements for next year. I think we spent a total of $50 on this project which wasn't too bad.
