Tomorrow is the Pinewood Derby, that potentially exasperating cultural phenomenon for young Cub Scouts that they cannot exactly do by themselves. I admit to not really understanding this event. Once upon a time, I suspect that boys used to labor for several weeks to make their perfect pine car, one that involved hours of coping, sanding, shaping, and painting. If our pack is any evidence of current trends, and I believe it is, this task has now been handed over to adult males, if it's done at all, with a range of results from completely square, barely painted bus to powder-coated, professionally sprayed engineering feats.

If the truth be told, my problem is that we didn't make it to any of the "Cubstruction" dates our den had this year. The first one was still within that magic zone of the New Year's holiday weekend. The second was the day of Legend of the Poinsettia. The third was last weekend, and the boys went to the river for the weekend with some friends. This meant that the task of creating a car was up to us. Cubstruction is a euphemism for these freezing cold sessions in some zealous adult male scout leader's garage where paper templates for car shapes are set out, young boys choose one and trace it onto their piece of wood, and then they get in line to have their shape cut by a $500 power-tool. When it is handed back to them, they go stand in another line to hand "their" car routed on the bottom by another male seeking to announce his manhood, and then they move to a zone where, and I kid you not here...someone is melting lead fishing weights and pouring the molten lead into the routed strip in the bottom of the car. Then they move to another line, where the car is placed on an inexpensive specialty scale, and a lengthy process of back and forth between a Dremel or other grinder and the scale to get the car within a tenth of an ounce range of the accepted limit. Yes, boys are standing around while lead, a substance proven to cause reproductive and intellectual damage by ingestion in its airborne form, is ground all over a garage and where sanding is spewing it into the air. My Christmas lights all have warnings about how the state of California acknowledges these wires contain lead, a substance known to cause brain damage, and I need to wash my hands after handling them. I am still receiving daily alarmist emails telling me that every bookstore in the company is about to go out of business because every book and toy in America is going to be imminently incinerated lest it contain lead in the printing of its cover. But the Boys Scouts of America melt it, pour it, sand it, grind it, and then hand it in a touchable form right to 6-12 year old boys so that they can fondle their adult-made pinewood derby car and admire it for posterity.

But I digress. I bucked the system. Last night, I did help with their Pinewood Derby cars. We started with a coping saw. A dull coping saw. A dangerously dull coping saw. I did much of the sawing for them because it was difficult, because we didn't have a bench with a vise that was working properly, and because the blade was indeed dangerously dull and not cutting well and a hazard to all who used it. But we marked off places to cut, I got the cuts started, and they helped. Then we all hacked at some of those cut areas with a hammer when the going got really tough (say, when the blade had no teeth left...). Then I pulled out the Dremel and we tried a lot of different attachments, determining that we preferred the barrels of sandpaper, the lower the grit the better. They ground and sanded and shaped their cars for about an hour. They practiced putting different attachments in the tool, learning the cardinal lesson that the most important thing to do it unplug before sticking your hand in the chuck. Our cars don't look like they were made by an engineering post-graduate, but they do look pretty darn awesome.

What's funny is that Walter and Ollie ended up arguing repeatedly about the copyright on their designs. Ollie decided that he was going to make a Pinewood Prius, with an Area 51 theme. We chopped the nose off the front, and he Dremeled it to give it that podular curve. While we were hacking off the front of Walter's car, we noticed that we could leave on a piece and it would look like a duck-billed platypus, so his car became The Platyprius. Ollie's kind of mad--he has the hybrid, and he wants a corner on that market. Walter thinks its a free country.

They painted them, and that was its own adventure. Nothing quite beats spray paint, so that's what we did. We put down cardboard boxes on the garage floor and they got to work. The fumes were overpowering. There was mayhem, there was panic, there were complaints of nausea. I think we'll buy some paint today at Ben Franklin.

I need to take them out to buy some weights for the bottom of the car. I'm hoping for a metal other than lead. I'm hoping for safety.