Looking for advice on my first car
- Thread starter Motorlust
- Start date
Wow, thanks for sharing.
Also thanks to all for the great feedback so far. It sounds like I can maybe use the weight limit to my advantage. I feel a couple others here at work might be taking full advantage of the weight limit too, but I feel with everyones help here, I can beat them!
Thanks again!
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Awesome, thanks for the offer, I will PM you.
I fully intend to update this thread with my progress and with any luck shots of final car and trophy...
Looking forward to that. If there's no pics it didn't happen!!!Awesome, thanks for the offer, I will PM you.
I fully intend to update this thread with my progress and with any luck shots of final car and trophy...
There was a news broad cast here in utah that john said a car over 8 oz is slower. His razor wheel car won every race. the other car was full of lead 3/8 holes the full length of the body, lightened wheels. axles sanded to 3000 and peeped with wd40. I think the vid is on youtube.
The wheel in that kit are around 3.3 grams and very unbalanced they are as good as trash. The axles at least don't have bur marks. Your better off with bearings and different wheels
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Just depends on who is making the car, using current oil prep practices I don't think physics is making it slower at 8 ounces.... I think the builder is...
5 Kids proved that wrong. I think weight has a different effect depending on the wheels. I don't think it has the same effect with a bearing car.
I built two outlaw bearing cars for a local race, the first one was overkill, it carried 138 tungsten cubes and tipped the scales right at two pounds. I made oversized acrylic bearing razors to prevent wheel deflection from the weight. It surprised me when it wasn't really any faster than a conventional Unlimited! So I built the second car much thinner, it came in at 14 oz. It was about .005 quicker than the mammoth car using the same wheels, axles, and bearings. What really surprised me was the short times, the heavier car was actually quite a bit slower to reach the 1 foot timer on my track. I believe it was a pretty graphic example of Newton's Law of Inertia. I also don't think the hill was long enough to fully convert all of the potential energy to kinetic energy before it reached the flat and then it had to deal with all that weight down the flat as well. I'll leave the calculations for the mathematicians of the group! lol
I used Johns axles and Basx wheels with oil. There were 2 cars that had razor wheels in the class the finished 2nd and 3rd. Not sure what they weighed. They probably don't know about this forum though so I think I had the advantage with my setup
We have a seapunk/tron theme going on with the poster for this event... thought I would share.
Yes, sorry for the delay. I wanted to collect some of the photos and videos from the event... but I will post a few of my own from that day.
So... with the help of everyone here who offered advice and special thanks to DerbyDad for his awesome plug n play kit, I am happy to report that We Won!!!
There was more competition than I had expected in the speed category, but we made quick work of the qualifying rounds, and were able to take our way to the championship rounds. We won 3 of the 4 championship rounds, and I think the one loss was due to a bum start or lane.
I will say I learned a lot from this competition about Pine Wood Derby and factors of what make something fast. This was super fun for me, and as I have three kids of my own, I can't wait to do their first Pine Wood cars with them!
So to explain the design of my car (and I apologize it's not kid friendly, but this race was between adults at work), the theme of the race was "Seapunk" (google it) a twisted concept in itself, I thought the cocaine theme was funny and likely the necessary ingredient to fully appreciate anything "Seapunk". I was also going after a design award as well. Again, I was going for style points, it's not intended to offend anyone. Also, to the very obvious design element of the gun on the back of the car... with the 10oz weight limit for this event, we wanted to make sure the car was just at 10oz so it had a chance at winning against other 10oz cars. The goal was to have the body, wheels etc as light as possible and to have the bulk of the weight in the right place as to give the car the best chance to gain the most speed in the decent section of the track. So with the lead weights we got from DerbyDad's kit the car came to a perfect 5oz as you might imagine, so we knew we needed to double the weight of the car. We went to the hardware store to see what we could find... we got some fishing weights and lock that felt pretty solid. Weighing the objects with the car, the lock seemed to bring us to the exact 10oz we were looking for. Then I realized it kinda looked like a gun, so I took some of the reflective paper we used for the mirror surface to fashion a grip and trigger for the lock so it looked more like a gun and covered the key hole for the lock as well. We had a razor blade on the mirror surface at one point, but removed it before the race.
Anyhow, sorry for the long description, but building the car was as much fun as racing it.
It was a bit of a mad dash to get the car submitted the morning of the race since we were still trying to get the finishing touches and weight secured to the car before the deadline. We got one chance to do a test run, but without all the lead weights secured to the bottom of the car (I was still glueing them in place) and we ran a 3.06 sec run, and at that point, two other cars had run sub 3 sec passes. I knew we had competition, but also suspected our car would run faster once I added the remaining 1.5 oz of weights.
Our final championship rounds we posted only sub 3 times and won 3 of the 4 passes. Our best time was 2.82.
[PHOTOS]
RACE VIDEO LINK = https://goo.gl/photos/BQH9CmaCsY4nVCWN6
CARS VIDEO LINK = https://goo.gl/photos/XC1Buz2AhMXjaBR69
PHOTO ALBUM = https://goo.gl/photos/cMvHsyeKKGFVWUDX7
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Nice! Bringing home the big W! I'm so glad that car with just the block of wood on wheels labeled top for us cuz that would have been confusing haha. Looks like one of those cars had bearings? The unicorn horn looking thing? Was that one of the faster cars?
I don't think it had bearings, I think the wheels were just painted gold. It was not in the final rounds. The Fish looking car with the hook and lures was fast and right at 10oz, as well as the second place car the red one, that had smelted lead filling the bottom. They both posted sub 3 times... just not as fast as our "Sugar Rush" car.
Sorry I didn't see that other car that was actually a unicorn with a horn sticking up with gold wheels haha I was talking about the car that was actually shaped like a horn/funnel that had the axles sticking out far past the wheels- not sure if those are bearing axles or just one solid axle for both wheels- I was just curiousI don't think it had bearings, I think the wheels were just painted gold. It was not in the final rounds. The Fish looking car with the hook and lures was fast and right at 10oz, as well as the second place car the red one, that had smelted lead filling the bottom. They both posted sub 3 times... just not as fast as our "Sugar Rush" car.
Ahh, got ya. No, that car he spun on a lathe and made into a unicorn or narwhal horn. He used the kit axels with the wheels dangling at the ends of each axel. It was a terrible car, but it did look cool. Haha.
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