To give my eldest son the opportunity to make a few more friends, my wife signed him up with the local scout pack. Little did I know that it would involve more work for me than him. So far we’ve had to build a bird house and a toolbox (both of which my father-in-law thankfully helped him out with, not I), and there seems to be a constant list of ‘belt loops’ (the new version of ‘achievement patches’) that he’s going for, requiring me to teach him how to repair a puncture on his bike, or whittle a model out of soap, or weave his own wicker man or something, just about every weekend.
About a month ago he came home from Scouts with a ‘model car kit’. This consisted of a block of wood about 4″ x 6″ x 2″ with four small ‘axle holes’ pre-drilled into it, four plastic wheels, and four nails. Well, it’s not exactly Airfix, I thought, but we could maybe shave the wood down a bit to at least make it look like a car. I mentioned this to one of the other dads I know, and he was good enough to point out to me that I needed to do a lot more than just that if I didn’t want my son ridiculed by the other scouts – and me ridiculed by the other fathers – on race day. First, I had to fill in the pre-drilled axle holes and drill myself new ones, because the pre-drilled ones were “totally in the wrong place”, then I had to drill more holes into the body and sink lead weights into them. The official allowed weight is no more than 5g, the wood is around 3g (even before you start cutting it to shape) and apparently if you want to stand any chance in the race at all, it has to come in at exactly 5g. Once I had cut the car to the best aerodynamic shape I could manage, I had to sand it a smooth as a baby’s arse, with 400-grade sandpaper, then carefully paint and wax or varnish it, and then polish it over and over again, to reduce ‘wind resistance’. So that was several late nights out in the ‘tool-shed (actually a built-in shelf in the garage that I ‘renovated’ by removing one of the shelves and hanging a light in it). But I wasn’t done yet. No, sirree.
Apparently the most important thing is the ‘axles’ – you remember, those four nails that came in the box. Nails come with burrs on them (invisible to the untrained eye) where they’ve been molded or cut from wire. I was told I needed to grind these back so the nails were completely smooth. I then had to sand the nails a bit thinner so there was less drag on the wheels, and polish the hell out of them so they looked more like chrome than whatever nails are really made out of. One of the other dads also offered to lend me some magic thing he’d rigged up to ‘straighten’ the nails, but by this stage I’d kind of had enough and reasoned that the nails were good enough – I wasn’t building a space shuttle. The final step was to lubricate the axles. For some reason oil isn’t actually allowed (I initially tried bike chain oil – which worked like a dream – until I read the rule book and found this out and had to frantically clean it all off again) so everyone uses graphite. Actually graphite powder - and lots of it. Because there are a lot of scout packs out in the ‘burbs where we are, just about every hardware store in the area had sold out of graphite, and I only managed to track down a tube (and the last tube in the last shop) late on the night before the race. Disaster narrowly avoided, there.
Anyway, I did get it all done in time, after many, many hours of effort – very few of which were actually spent by Finn. To his credit, he did do some of the drilling and sanding, and he also came up with the basic idea for the shape and paint job (and I get the distinct impression that even this was more than most dads will trust their kids to do) – but all the mind-stultifying nail-grinding was done by yours truly. That said, I’m pretty pleased with the finished result – it certainly looked the part – and Finn seemed pretty psyched about it too. He probably would have been more enthusiastic still, had I not been getting all protective by the end of the manufacturing process: “Don’t touch the bodywork, you’ll leave fingerprints on it”, “Leave the wheels alone, I’ve just graphited them”, “No, I’ll carry it – you might drop it and knock the axles out of alignment”, etc., etc.
To give me the opportunity to make a few more friends (or maybe just to wind me up, as she knows I don’t really like people) my wife signed me up to help out on race day, as part of the Pit Crew. This entailed helping people get their cars conforming to the official rules, prior to racing – largely, drilling out excess weight, or supergluing on additional weight, as required. They even had a laminated ‘pit pass’ for me, but thankfully stopped short of making me wear a red jumpsuit and baseball cap. Still, it was fun – all these kids looking at you in awe, as you do your best not to screw up something that’s taken them (or their dads) weeks to build. Apart from the one kid who just had a straight wedge of wood, colored with magic marker, with a couple of lead weights just blu-tacked to the top of it. They said that there was one unnamed kid who had absolutely no help from his (drop-out / absentee) dad, and I’m guessing it was him. It made me feel better about doing most of the work on Finn’s car myself – at least there was proof positive that I was actively engaged (albeit almost to the point of exclusion!) in my son’s life.
Last Saturday was Race Day, which turned out to be an event with a capital E, with food stalls, concession stands, and all the hoopla you’d expect of a monster truck rally (yes, I’ve been to one or two…). ‘Registration’ was highly controlled, with the kind of ultra-sensitive scales you normally only see in dope-dealer’s kitchens, and assorted wooden contraptions for making sure the car wasn’t over-size, or lacked the necessary clearance (not sure why this is important on a flat track…). Once the car was checked in, it was taken away by the ‘race officials’ to make sure there was no ‘funny business’. What was funny was that the hand-carved cars that had been carried in in purpose-built felt-lined boxes (really! I half-expected to see someone carrying one on a velvet cushion, warning “Don’t touch it. Don’t even look at it!”) were still just dumped in the same tray as the nails’n’glue Ralph Wiggum efforts, all banging around together, being carried to the start line.
The track itself was kind of like an over-sized Hot Wheels track, with four lanes, and a length of maybe 15 metres, starting from about 4ft in the air (mixing my measurement systems somewhat), and sloping down to the ground in about the first 2 yards – that’s why the weight is so important. Most impressive was the automated start gates and electronic timer. This was all controlled from a PC (you can actually buy software for this stuff! – Microsoft Pinewood Derby Enterprise Edition, or something) that opened the gates to release the cars down the hill, and timed the run down to the trigger at the finish point. The timer even measured seconds to three decimal places which I thought was a bit unnecessary, but with a fastest recorded time of 3.092 seconds, some 0.019 ahead of the next-fastest car, apparently not.
As there were only four lanes, and around 60 cars in all, there were lots of heats. Each car got to race four times, with the computer recording the times from each heat, and then re-jigging the cars for the next round according to their times. At the end of everything, it spat out reports of winners by class, pack, heat, etc, etc. All clever stuff.
Out of our car’s four heats, we actually won one of them (at which point I learnt that it’s considered bad form to whoop and holler and high-five your son when you win – something to do with not making the ‘runners up’ feel bad – good job we stopped short of the belly-slams!) but came last in the other three. Needless to say, we didn’t win the grand prix. Nor the fastest in our class, pack, or anything else. We did get a prize for ‘shiniest car’ or something – remember, this is America, where “no-one is a loser” so everyone gets a prize for something. Fortunately, Finn lacks my cynical eye, and seemed happy enough with it all.
Me, I’m not satisfied at all. I’m already planning next year’s car. If I start now, maybe I can get a jump on the competition and make something truly impressive. Of course I’ll need a whole new set of power tools (on top of the Dremel I bought for this year), but that’s apparently all part of being a fully-integrated American Dad…
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