Sunday, May 2, 2010

Pinewood Derby








Some of my racing fans




My Grandpa Dale and I made my Pinewood Derby car while we were in Arizona. My favorite part about making it was using the belt sander. There was a thick sand belt that spins super fast. I held the front of my car on the belt sander and I made my hood super smooth. You couldn't really feel any bumps. My second favorite part was painting it. At the hobby store we bought blue spray paint and shiny spray paint. We did it in the back yard so we didn't have the house painted a new color. I stood about a foot away from the car and sprayed it. My extra weights we spray painted shiny silver to make it look like real metal. Putting the weights in was kind of hard but we got it to weigh exactly 5 ounces, no more, no less. It looked awesome! I had a super fun time doing this with my Grandpa.

My car was in the first race and when the stick that held it in place was supposed to go down, it misfired and knocked my car off the track, down 4 feet or so to the ground. It dented in my wheel and killed my fin. The people in charge checked it out and said it was just fine. We didn't realize until all of the races were over that my car was damaged. Pretty dumb. I didn't place but that's okay. I'm planning on making my car look like a boat next year. It'll probably be simple and I actually might win. We looked on the computer and saw that somebody won 3 races by making their car look like a boat. The only hard part is probably going to be putting the weights in. We'll see. I could change my mind.


Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The Gingerbread Train



In my class at school I did a gingerbread train to represent the Polar Express. To make everything stick we had to put frosting underneath. Then we put all the decorations on. I thought the best part of the train was that I made a snowman out of marshmallows, one pretzel stick, and one chocolate chip. It was a little bit fun making the train, but more fun to just look at it.