Mater: Building Buddy’s Sibling Car

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The 2017 pinewood derby season is off to the races!  For this year we decided to build Mater as Buddy’s sibling car.   Mater isn’t exactly aerodynamic so we don’t expect him to be fast.   Instead of using decals I decided to attempt to carve all of the detail into the wood and accomplish final detailing with paint.  I don’t know how I could have accomplished this carving without an oscillating saw/sander.  If you are interested in how we built the Mater pinewood derby car take a look at the slide show for most of the steps.

UPDATE:  I didn’t have a scale in MN while building him but thought I could get enough weight out simply by drilling him out.  However, I was way over weight nearly 10 oz which is almost double the allowed weight.   After removing his tow rack and carving virtually the entire inside of the body, removing the rear window and most of the truck bed I finally made race weight at 5.03 oz.  For a few minutes I thought he wasn’t going to make it!  Here are some race ready pics showing the extent of the carving.  If I had to do it over again I would have cut the base block down to a small sliver and used Balsa wood for the rest of the carving.