re: Pinewood Derby?

quote:

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I don’t care about the legality of the body kit, I think the kid should be getting blisters from sanding and then painting his own car rather than gluing a piece of plastics and putting on some stickers.

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Did you mist the part where I said he sawed his dad's finger?

Who gets blisters anymore when we have orbital mouse sanders? You've obviously never worked with these cars before because they are just about the softest pine I've ever seen. Breathe on it hard and it takes off 0.01". And just because you can't see the block, doesn't mean he didn't do any work on it. He did have to cut it down and shape it so the body would fit on it. You state you favor the old fashioned way of painting and sanding. Here are the things he done in addition to paint and sand paper.

He's put tons of time in on the cordless drill polishing axles. This is his first real experience with power tools.

We've worked on the computer graphics (nothing fancy just MS Paint). We had to find the right files and size them and resize them and finally print then on the right decal paper. He worked really hard getting our decals to line up right on the car. We had a lot of test prints on regular paper that he had to cut out and line up by hand to see if they were the right size. Putting on the decals was his favorite part. He called the water slide decals "magic".

He's learned electronics and soldering hooking up the sound board. That includes learning about voltage and polarity. How many 7 year old do you know that can work a soldering iron (and not burn their house down)?

He's learned how to put together sound files on to put sound effects and songs on the MP3 player.

We've learned about kinetic energy and rotational energy in doing our wheel "spin tests". We time tested every wheel with every axle to find our best matched pair. We logged all the data in excel.

You might not like it, but here's the deal, in plastic body serves a very important function in this case. It serves as a resonator for the laptop speakers we embedded in the wood body of the car. In reality, the large profile of this body will make our car slower. (For every 0.1 inch of body exposed to the air, you lose approx 0.06 sec over a 30' pinewood derby track). With the extra exposed greenhouse area of the car, we've actually added to the cross sectional area of the vehicle, which equates to slower speed.

So that's fine. Throw a 7 year old under the bus for using a "short cut". But don't look at all the other work he did and all the other skills he learned beyond sanding and painting.