Fabulous Hudson Hornet – Pinewood Derby race car
My son’s Hudson Hornet took third place in the Webelos division of his pack’s Pinewood Derby. Reader Lora requested a play-by-play of how we built our car.
The first thing to note was that I didn’t think we’d get it done… the first car we did two years ago took the better part of two weekends to complete. It took us less that a weekend to build this car. Maybe we’re just getting efficient.
I did not actually help my son cut out the basic shape. He did that at his papa’s house. I imagine they sketched out the image from memory since the back of the car wasn’t exactly right. The Hudson Hornet has a trunk, his doesn’t.
The busy work known as sanding was made short by a Mouse sander. Who has the time to hand sand things anymore? That’s so old school.
When it came to the paint job, there are actually four separate coats. First, we primed the body with a standard spray primer. This was followed by two coats of navy blue spray paint. The brand we used was Rust-Oleum’s Painter’s Touch spray paint. I picked it up at the Home Depot. To better facilitate an even paint job, I balanced the car on a large nail and rotated it as needed to paint.
For the grill and the windows, I came up with the simplest possible solution: Silver Sharpie.
The decals were a bit harder. If I had time to order actual decals, I would have just gotten them on eBay. I didn’t. I spent about three hours making them myself. Most of the decals were pretty straight forward, but the bend in “Fabulous” gave me fits.
To design the decals, I used a program called Inkscape. Its an open source (that means free) drawing application. This program allowed me to create a vector image of the decals that I could resize until I got the proper dimensions for our car. I bought white labels from Avery ( #8165) and printed the decals at the highest resolution for our printer.
I’ve exported the decals as a PDF for anyone to have: Hudson Hornet decals (pdf). For the brave of heart, technologically daring or anal retentive, I also have the original source file you can edit: Hudson Hornet decals source (svg). (Right click to download, direct link will probably not work.)
The final coat of paint was actually a clear gloss sprayed over the car after the decals had already been attached. I’m hoping the gloss will help preserve the stickers for many years of display.
Wheel assembly was pretty straight forward. I was luckily able to push the nails in by hand and didn’t need to resort to a hammer.
Before painting, I cut a notch in the underside of the car for the placement of weights. In the notch I put a variety of lead fishing sinkers, and a small bar of metal. The weights are covered by two pieces of black electrical tape that hold the weight in place. Depending on the style of track, this may or may not be a good idea. If the track is one solid piece on which the car rides, the tape may cause too much resistance.
By the time all of the paint and decals had been added, our car was exactly 5.0 ounces with the metal bar. Unfortunately, this gave us no wiggle room if the judges’ weight scale read differently than ours. I ended up roto-zipping a bunch more wood from the interior of the car to give us some manual control over the weight. It was 5.0 on the head at the weigh-in.
So that about covers the process we went through to build this champion. The best part of the car, by far, was the time spent building it with my son.
6 Comments
- Lora said:
- stelt said:
- y0mbo said:
- Greg said:
- John said:
- Mary said: