i’m resting my arms right now from working on noah’s pinewood derby. last year adam won district with his hot-dog mobile. apparently he wanted to go out on top because he decided that he didn’t want to build a car this year. noah on the other hand decided to steal adam’s foot motif from the year before and wants to build a blazing ice cream sandwich.
you would think that it would be easy to build an ice cream sandiwch. it’s flat. the piece of pine that you start our with is flat. this should be pretty easy right? nope, it’s not. the reason it’s not is because i broke the blade that i was working with. i needed to cut away approximately a third of the thickness of the soon to be ice cream sandwich. that wouldn’t be that difficult if my band saw had a blade. actually it did have a blade for a few really good seconds. unfortunately those mere seconds weren’t long enough to actually cut the piece of pine into it’s ice cream sandwich shape. on the good side the blade had a good long life.
not to be daunted i decided to use my belt sander to remove the extra 1/3 that i was going to be cut with the now none existent band saw. this seemed like a good idea. after all, the purpose of a sander is to remove small amounts of wood. i figured i would continue to push the pine against the belt letting the belt remove small pieces of pine until the full third was removed. it seemed like a perfect plan and it would have been if the sanding belt was new. it wasn’t and therefore it didn’t remove much if any wood. strike two!
third time’s the charm right? well apparently it is with pinewood derby ice cream sandwiches. it was on my third effort that i went to my trusty dremel tool. if you’re not familiar with a dremel tool just imagine a tool that can do anything and still fit in the palm of your hand. it’s kind of the swiss army knife of the handy man world. if you can’t fix something with a dremel then it can’t be fixed. the dremel never fails and it didn’t fail this time either. the dremel fixed what the band saw and belt sander couldn’t do. praise be to the dremel.
after a frustrating evening the basic design of the ice cream sandwich car is now laid out. tomorrow we paint!