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| Ond:
Sounds like a great fun 'father and son project' to get into. Like everything with kids make sure to involve them in the process in some way. I've never experienced a Pinewood Derby but when I was a kid I grew up on a street which intersected another at the bottom of a steep hill. In the summer months the neighbourhood kids would put together ramshackle billy carts as we called them made out of anything they could find. Some of them resembled something from the Wacky Racers with milk crates and timber from pallets and wotnot :lol. The defining characteristic of these was pram wheels up front and slick ball bearing wheels on a wooden axle at the back. This allowed mad ---daisies--- to tear-ass down the hill and execute 360 degree (or more) spins as they came down with sparks showering out the rear of the cart. Crashes into gutters etc. were frequent often with the carts progressively falling apart on each trip down. Its a miracle no one got killed. I told my dad I wanted a billy cart too, he being a master carpenter, proceeded to put together some sleek dream machine for me that was so fast I was scared to even go half way up the hill. Geez what was he thinking? I'd never let my kids do that these days. |
| j.fitzenr:
--- Quote from: Ond on April 22, 2015, 09:59:28 pm --- Geez what was he thinking? I'd never let my kids do that these days. --- End quote --- Lol, isn't that what chlidhood is all about? I remember my parents buying me a 'snowboard.' It was a piece of plastic shaped like a skateboard, with metal runners. No binding. No handles. It was a frickin' piece of plastic to fall off of! That soapbox/cart stuff sounds fantastic! I always dreamt of doing a soapbox derby kinda thang as a kid. I got lucky in that a neighbor had a couple go-karts tho... :) That seems to be an accelerating sentiment these days. I don't even feel like I'm particularly "old school" (I'm 30) but even like, 80% of my childhood couldn't happen these days. I think I finally started feeling "old" when I saw things like the parents who got ticketed because they let their 10 year old walk home from the park, etc. Jesus, the crap we used to do. I mean my dad made sure I had my own full tool kit by the time I was like 9, and when we said we wanted to build a treehouse, our parents just kinda handed us tools, pointed us at scrap wood, and said "dinner is at 7." Not to mention all the goodies we lifted from the currently under construction houses... Oh to be a kid again. I swear in retrospect we were all about 50/50 to survive it! |
| Howard_Casto:
Well I don't think most sane people had a problem with the 10 year old... it was the 6 year old sibling with him. That's a bit too young. |
| j.fitzenr:
I honestly didn't even really read the story or the ages involved, just glanced at the headline and it got me into "man, times have changed" mode. Hell if I were a parent I probably wouldn't even let the ten year old do it, let alone a six year old but that's neither here nor there, just got me thinkin' about my own childhood vs. the childhood of kids these days and wondering how I survived. Jammin, you're gonna have to update us as to how the car goes over, and how much it smokes the competition! You might want to steal something from the Large Hadron Collider a la South Park, just in case. And to think, I thought my car was cool because it had lightning-bolt decals on it. |
| jammin0:
Well, the results are in. His car placed 3rd overall and got a lot of oohs and ahhhs along the way. I am kind of glad that he didn't take first place just because we have two more years and this year's design will be hard to beat. I'm thinking he could do addressable RGBs next year and have it display messages, I think we'll have to start working on it sooner for the next one. |
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