Pinewood Derby Time!
It’s winter break in our household, and that means Pinewood Derby time for my oldest! Every year starting at around Thanksgiving, I get peppered with questions about the Pinewood Derby car that he’s going to build. What should we do this year? Can we build a car with only three wheels? Can we put a rocket engine on the car? What about batteries and a motor?
This year, due to an unscheduled job change, we lost access to the lathe that we would normally borrow for lathe polishing his axles and tuning his wheels. So, I challenged myself to develop 3D printed tooling for the building the car, and decided to share it with everyone!
Onshape CAD here. Without a login, you can spin the 3D CAD geometry around. With a login though, you can actually make edits to the file and customize things that way. You can sign up for a free (as in beer) “Maker” account and try Onshape - it runs in a web browser, so no installation required. The only caveat is that all your files are also publicly shared with everyone on a Maker account.
For those who want to get right into 3D printing, the PrusaSlicer files are here. PrusaSlicer is an open source piece of software that converts 3D geometry file (in the form of STEP, 3MF or STL) into the G-Code for driving the 3D printers. It is available for download on the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.
Finally, there are two youtube videos associated with the Pinewood Derby car. The first video talks about the science of pinewood derby cars and explains why each of the tools were designed. The second video deep dives into the actual fabrication of the tools and how each of the tools are used to build a Pinewood Derby car.
